


Left Behind

by Papapaldi



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Episode AU: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon, F/F, Post-Episode: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon, Time Lord Telepathy (Doctor Who), in which I am in love with Mandip Gill and Ritu Arya, the rarest of pairs – seriously why has no one written about them already
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: Yaz is trying to negotiate with a group of uncooperative Judoon officers when Ryan disappears in a flash of blue light. When a severe woman arrives to apprehend Lee Clayton – the so-called fugitive – she takes Yaz back to the Judoon ship for questioning.The Doctor rigged Gat's weapon to backfire, and simulate her death. In reality, Gat was teleported down to Earth, her communication equipment completely fried. Stranded, she tries to repair her tech, until she happens upon a TARDIS signal in the middle of Sheffield some weeks later.
Relationships: Yasmin Khan/Gat (Doctor Who)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 17





	1. Reversal

**Author's Note:**

> Tonight, my lesbians, we make history. We make the very first fic for the rarest of pairs: Gat and Yaz. Gaz? Yat? Take your pick. They may have never met, but they should have, and here is how it would’ve gone down. 
> 
> I sort of shipped these two from the get go just because hmm gay thoughts and all that. Then I saw Ritu Arya as Lila Pitts in The Umbrella Academy and I fell even more in love with her. This fic idea was originally just going to be a homoerotic interrogation, but then I thought of the teleporter thing and what if she found the house TARDIS that brought the fam back in ep 12 and nnnnowww it's a whole story. 
> 
> Also I did rewatch a couple scenes of fugitive before writing, and the Doctor does say ‘one Time Lord to another’ before showing Gat Gallifrey, but I am choosing to ignore it :/ It’s for the drama (and for inserting my own Gallifreyan hc, as is both my right and my responsibility).

**Yaz**

“We got this,” Ryan mutters under his breath, nodding to himself. “We got this. Totally got this. W –”

“Ryan,” Yaz hisses, interrupting him. 

“Right, sorry.”

They just have to buy the Doctor enough time to escape with Ruth. Tell the Judoon that the arbitration is over. No fugitive inside, just a highly suspicious, apparently-human called Lee Clayton. 

Ryan and Yaz exit the red-brick housing block and walk out onto the sunny Gloucester pavement beside the canal just in time to hear a piercing drone start up. The Judoon squadron firing up their weapon. Yaz still isn’t precisely sure what the weapon does, but it can’t be anything good. 

“Stop! Arbitration complete.” Yaz calls, and she and Ryan round the corner to face the squadron. A large, metal canon-like device is mounted on a three-tiered stand, a dim red light fizzling in its barrel. 

“Arbitration result?” The Judoon captain prompts. 

“You can come in now,” Ryan says calmly. 

“So long as you turn that off,” Yaz adds, in a far more commanding tone. Never give something up unless you’re getting something in return. Bargain with everything you’ve got. Ryan does his best, but negotiation is her game. 

Obediently, the Judoon captain turns and barks a low, growling order to her subordinates. The Judoon switch off the machine, and after a series of mechanical clicks a low hum as the engines power down, the street is left in suburban silence. Summer birds and the gentle rush of the grimy canal. The captain starts off at a march towards the housing complex where Lee is hopefully still waiting.

“No fugitives in there by the way,” Ryan says, in a way that would strike Yaz as highly conspicuous, if she were the one investigating. 

“And as for you lot,” Yaz calls to the remaining Judoon, beginning to dismantle their mounted weapon, “I don’t want you using that.” 

There’s a fizzle of blue light beside her, accompanied by a crackle of static in the air. In her peripheral, Ryan disappears. Yaz whips around to stare at the stain of mottled light left behind. 

“Ryan!” she cries, quickly scanning the scene. Her first instinct is that one of the Judoon fired their gun, and disintegrated Ryan on the spot. The thought makes her stomach drop and her heart race. In front of her, the Judoon seem unbothered, turning this way and that, grunting idly, and quickly resuming their work. 

“Hey!” Yaz shouts at them. “What did you do to Ryan? Where is he?”

One of the Judoon taps at a screen affixed to the wrist of their uniform. “Extractor beam,” they grunt. “Not Judoon technology.”

“Extractor,” Yaz murmurs, gazing up into the softly-clouded sky. “So he’s been teleported somewhere.” 

“Incident is unrelated.”

“Well scan it or something!” Yaz cries. “Who was it?” 

More clumsy tapping. It seems like the standard issue comms unit – which Yaz has become familiar with over so many intergalactic adventures – isn’t optimised for the Judoon’s large, tough-skinned fingers. 

“Unidentified vessel,” the Judoon responds. 

“Right,” Yaz mutters. “Very helpful.” Hopefully Ryan was extracted by the Doctor, or at the very least someone friendly. For now, she’ll just have to hope, as much as she hates being powerless to help. Until then, discovering the truth about Lee, and hopefully keeping him safe, will fall to her alone. Easy. 

The Judoon captain fiddles with her own comms device, bringing it up to her mouth. “Source of fugitive signal located,” she says. “Clear to proceed.” 

A few moments later there is a zap and a sputter of gold. Different from the smooth pleats of blue that had spirited Ryan away, this light is sharp, formed out of straight lines of force that stretch and distort like lens flares. The light dissipates to reveal a small, thin figure clothed in a dark coat, a long black ponytail streaked with red trailing down their back. Definitely not Judoon.

“So you’ve got them, do you?” A woman’s voice asks; high and clear and dripping with disdain. 

“Source of fugitive signal located,” the captain repeats.

The woman sighs. “Well, let’s get this over with.”

“Who are you?” Yaz calls out. A higher authority than the Judoon captain, so it’s time that Yaz establish herself as an equally qualified presence, even if she is only improvising. The Doctor does it all the time. 

The woman turns. She looks human, though Yaz knows this by no means proves that she is. Young – not much older than Yaz, at least by the look of her – with a narrow nose and pointed chin. Everything about her is sharp, from her crisp black collar hemmed with gold, to her immaculate winged eyeliner. Her dark eyes glisten threateningly, and her thin lips curve into an impatient smirk. 

“You dare to address,” she begins, but falters, mouth held open for a moment. “No, wait,” she wrinkles her eyebrows and takes a step closer to Yaz. Her dark coat catches the soft breeze, striking out behind her in an imposing silhouette. “Where did you find this one?” The woman asks one of the Judoon standing behind Yaz. 

“Earth representative with Imperial Regulator. Conducting arbitration.”

The woman’s expression sours in contempt. “The people on this planet have no conception of intergalactic law, not at this point in their timeline. This one’s a time traveller,” she nods towards Yaz, eyeing her with a curious hunger. She taps at an instrument on her wrist – an identical comms unit – which seems to ruminate over her instruction for a moment before emitting a series of whirrs and clicks. “This artron signature is atrocious,” the woman mutters under her breath. “Who was with her?” she asks the Judoon.

“I’m nobody,” Yaz says indignantly, “I was just trying to help.” The woman ignores her. 

“Two other humans,” the Judoon answers. Yaz is unsure of how much to reveal. Maybe it would be wise to run, but she won’t leave Lee undefended. His safety is her responsibility now, even if he is extremely suspicious, and very probably guilty. 

“Did you check?” the woman asks in a caustic tone. The Judoon being interrogated lets out a low grunt, unsure. The woman turns to the captain with a blazing look in her eyes. “Well, did you?”

A short hesitation. “There was not sufficient time to – “

“Didn’t cross your tiny minds,” she finishes, rolling her eyes. “Well, I suppose you get what you pay for. Hold her,” she commands, “we’ll have to take her back to the ship. I suspect she’s one of _her’s_.” 

“Hey, wait!” Yaz cries, as the Judoon subordinates draw their weapons. Yaz puts her hands up as two of them lumber towards her. She won’t risk fighting back. She doubts that they will hesitate to shoot her. Now would be a great time for an extractor beam – provided that it was actually sent by the Doctor. The alternative is too awful to bear thinking about, especially when she’s being held at gunpoint by Rhinos from space. Judoon officers hold Yaz roughly by each arm, and shove a pair of large, mechanical cuffs towards her hands. Automatically, the cuffs fasten themselves around her wrists in a flurry of metallic clinks and clacks, pinning her arms behind her back. “Hey, you can’t just arrest me for no reason!” Yaz shouts. “You don’t have jurisdiction here.”

“Maybe they don’t,” the woman replies smugly, “but I do. You’re an illegal time traveller, so you’re my responsibility. Two of you stay,” she says to the pair of Judoon holding Yaz, her tone soft and menacing. “The rest, come with me. It’s time we brought this embarrassing chapter to a close.” 

Yaz is forced to stand outside the housing complex, powerless, biding her time. At least, that’s what she tells herself. Biding her time, forming a plan. It’s what the Doctor tells them she’s doing whenever they get themselves captured. 

The woman and the Judoon – her hired muscle, it seems – don’t stay in the house for long, and after a few minutes Yaz hears a sharp, galvanising blast from inside the house. She’s been around the block long enough to know what an alien blaster sounds like, though she hopes that just this once she is wrong. The Doctor always finds a way to save people at the last moment, even when they don’t deserve it. Well, almost always. Sometimes. Regardless, if Lee is dead, then Yaz should have done more to prevent it. 

The woman commanding the Judoon returns to the promenade with a grim, disgruntled expression on her face. It seems that she didn’t find what she was looking for. That’s something, at least. 

“What did you do to Lee?” Yaz shouts, mustering as much intimidation as she can while being held by two very muscular alien Rhinos. 

“Was that what he called himself,” the woman shrugs. “Stupid name. I killed him, obviously.”

“You can’t just kill human beings!” Yaz snarls. “This isn’t your planet – by intergalactic law, you have no – “

“Will one of you shut her up?” the woman cries, and puts an elegant, black manicured hand to her brow, wincing in frustration. “Don’t recite intergalactic law as if you know what you’re talking about, human. I was the one who had to memorise it.” She brings her arm down and stares out at the street, looking worried and impatient. 

“Fine. You have your fugitive, now leave.” Yaz keeps her tone frigid, and glares at the woman with every ounce of menace that she has. “Leave, or face the consequences.”

“Oh,” the woman smiles, stepping toward Yaz slowly. Her heeled boots scrape brittly against the moss-covered pavings. “The consequences, is that right.” Her eyes are wide, her smile patronising. Almost most close enough for Yaz to kick out at her, though doing so may well get her shot. As if reading Yaz’s violent intentions, the woman stops just out of Yaz’s reach. 

“Yeah, that’s right,” Yaz says, with full conviction. 

The woman’s smile widens, revealing perfect, too-white teeth. “The fugitive is still at large,” She announces to the Judoon squadron. “Scour the perimeter, they can’t have gone far. They would have left from this building.” She raises her eyebrows expectantly at them. “Well what are you waiting for? Track them!” she cries. 

The Judoon captain grunts a low affirmative, beginning to fiddle with the device on her wrist, and relaying a series of orders to her officers in a grumbling tone.

“I really don’t want this to take all day,” their contractor sighs. Not police at all, but law-abiding mercenaries, offering their fire-power to the highest bidder. “Right, this one’s with me,” the woman nods to the Judoon holding Yaz. She clicks a series of buttons on her wrist-strapped instrument in quick succession, and an affirmative beep sounds in response from the cuffs binding Yaz’s hands. “Don’t hold your breath,” the woman smiles, before tapping her comms device. A flurry of golden light sparks across Yaz’s vision, striking across in bolts of lightning. A sickening sensation churns in her gut, spinning itself through every trailing nerve, before she feels her eyes roll back, her stomach fall away, and loses consciousness. 

Yaz snaps to attention in a dark room. Stains of dappled gold spot her vision as the dim red of her surroundings come into focus. She is standing, despite only just regaining consciousness. Beneath her feet is a white disc of light, and from it extends a field of pale translucence that stretches up above her head in a rippling ring of force. The air is alive with static electricity, smelling of burning toast and engine grime. Her hands are unbound, but she can’t move, her muscles hanging languid and paralysed within what she has come to call, over many an encounter with similar devices, a stasis field. She feels a numbing sensation spreading thick and heavy over her limbs and torso. 

The room she inhabits is small and free of furnishings; dark metal panelling upon the walls, small, red lights inlaid just below the ceiling at regular intervals. Above, steam drifts from silver vents, and the groaning of an enormous machine at work heaves, muffled through the ceiling. There is a small rectangular window on the wall to Yaz’s right. It shows a black expanse dotted with stars. Slowly, memory comes back to her. Captive on a Judoon ship, Ryan snatched by an unidentified extractor beam, and Graham likely enjoying a pleasant stroll about Gloucester, maybe stopping off at a nice cafe along the way. The Doctor is with Ruth, and Lee is dead. Yaz isn’t sure how long ago it all happened, but it can’t have been too long, because the Doctor isn’t here yet. 

So, arrested for illegal time travel, paralysed, and completely alone. Not what she expected when the Doctor told them they’d be stopping over in modern-day Gloucester. 

Tentatively, Yaz tries out her vocal chords, hoping that they haven’t paralysed those too. “Hey!” she calls out, and smiles to herself. Result. Muscles in her face and throat totally accessible. If she can talk, then she can negotiate. Words can get you out of just about anything, as the Doctor has proven to them time and time again. “Hello?” Yaz yells, as loudly as she can. It doesn’t do much to penetrate the din of the ship’s engines. “Hello, prisoner here. If you lot are supposed to be bound under intergalactic law, then I’ve got a few rights I’d like to call upon.” Prisoners probably have rights in space, same as they do on Earth. She wonders if she’s entitled to a phone call. 

A soft hiss echoes through the metal chamber, and a panel in the far wall slides across, letting a draft of stagnant, recycled air flush through. A figure stands in the doorway, wearing dark trousers and a white, high-collared blouse under a smart leather vest. The woman from earlier, having abandoned some of her earlier gaudish accessories, seems less foreboding and more like a disgruntled office worker or a futuristic pirate. The angular black headdress has been removed, along with the jacket with all its gold lining and red, studded shoulder pads. There’s a bulky pistol strapped to a holster on her hip. 

“You’re the one in charge, aren’t you?” Yaz asks. She tilts up her chin in defiance, though she can’t do much about the rest of her body. “You can’t just pluck someone off their own planet. I need to get in contact with someone,” she says levelly. “I have the right.” 

“You don’t have any rights,” the woman says dismissively. “I am not Judoon, in case you haven’t noticed. Intergalactic law is for lesser species.” She surveys Yaz from afar, unblinking and hauntingly still. 

“Why hire them then? If you’re outside the law, why bother?” 

She raises an eyebrow in disdain. “I can’t be expected to do everything myself. I need muscle, I need numbers. Judoon are cheap, and stupid, but they get the job done,” she sighs, then mutters under her breath, “hopefully.” 

“Your job,” Yaz echoes, “to find the fugitive?’ May as well get as much information as she can. When she escapes, the Doctor will want to know. “Why aren’t you off doing that now?”

“Because the grunts are out searching. I should have hired a better force, but that’s budget cuts for you. Satisfied now, are you,” she flashes Yaz a sordid smile. She tucks her hands into her trouser pockets and walks across the threshold. The metal door slides shut behind her with a galvanising hiss, sealing them both in. “I’ve answered your little questions, now it’s your turn.” She faces Yaz, fixing her with a piercing gaze.

“Me? I don’t know anything.”

“Come on, human, I’m not stupid. You’re in a cage, I’m outside of it. Do you know how an interrogation works?”

Yaz scowls. “Well you may as well let me go. Me and my mates just happened by, wanted to help out. We’ve got no part in any of this.” 

The woman scoffs, smiling to herself. “A group of humans that just happened to con a Judoon squadron into thinking they were Imperial Regulators, and subsequently called upon the right to an arbitration before they conducted their search, of course. Besides, you’re practically covered in traces of arton energy. I think you have a very large part in this, and there’s no need to lie.” 

“I’m not lying,” Yaz replies stiffly. There isn’t very much that she can say in her defence. 

“But I was right, wasn’t I?” the woman says wryly. “You’re one of her humans – oh, what is the silly name she gave herself,” she gazes up for a moment, biting her lip. “That’s it,” she grins, “the Doctor.”

Yaz’s chest goes cold. She was under the impression that this had nothing to do with them. “You know the Doctor?” Yaz asks, curiosity overpowering sensibility. 

The woman narrows her eyes. “Unfortunately.”

“How?”

She raises her eyebrows. “She’s the fugitive, of course. I thought you figured this out already.”

“What!” Yaz cries, “no she isn’t!” 

“Who did you think we were looking for?” she says incredulously, eyeing Yaz in disgruntled disbelief. The woman takes long, slow strides towards the stasis field. “So then,” she stops just short of the rippling wall of light, chip held up, gazing down her nose at Yaz. “Tell me where she is.” In her heels, the woman stands several inches taller.

Yaz doesn’t have the faintest idea, apart from the fact that the Doctor and Ruth were heading for the cathedral when she saw them last. She isn’t about to give up the only information she has. Pointedly, Yaz presses her lips together in silence. 

The woman’s patience quickly sours. “Tell me.” 

“Or what?”

“Or I will make you.”

“What are you planning on doing to me?” Yaz asks brightly. “I’m an illegal time traveller. What do you do with those, seeing as that’s apparently your area?” 

“Once the fugitive has been apprehended, your memory will be wiped of all anachronistic events and you will be returned to your time and place of origin,” she recites, bored. Anachronistic events. Yaz doesn’t need clarification to know that she means the Doctor. The Doctor, and all things alien. She won’t let them do it. All Yaz has to do is keep talking long enough for the Doctor to come and rescue her, and they won’t get the chance. 

“So really, I’ve got no reason to tell you anything,” Yaz says casually. “As soon as I tell you where the Doctor is, you’ll arrest her and wipe my memories. May as well just wait around for you to find her yourselves.”

The woman’s expression twitches, eyebrows drawn together and lips twisted up into a scowl. She has a short temper. “Fine, onto option two then.” She closes the gap between herself and the force field in two quick strides, and reaches a hand through the stasis field. The sheet of pleated light parts as her sharp, black nails pierce its surface. 

“What are you doing?” Yaz asks, alarmed. 

The woman smirks, cocking her head to one side. She stares at Yaz below red eyelids and thick, dark lashes. “Making you,” she whispers. Her hand reaches up, slow and elegant, to hang suspended next to Yaz’s head. She’s itching to reach out and push the woman away, but her fingers can only twitch feebly at her sides. Two soft fingertips press themselves, warm and electric, against Yaz’s temple, and a shock of white hot pain shoots through her nerves, heat spreading synaptic through her mind, her chest, extending to the extremities of paralysed limbs. 

Beyond the sensation, in that compressed instant, she feels a curious pull, hands rifling through and pinching painfully at strands of thought. Memories tugged free, examined, and clumsily stuffed back into place, bruising the surrounding flow of consciousness. Yaz gasps as the hot touch is relinquished, and she blinks her eyes open to see the Judoon’s commander smiling in a wicked, triumphant line. Yaz pants, chest fluttering in the dissipating heat. Her muscles ache and her whole head is throbbing, sweat glazing her skin. 

“There now,” the woman whispers. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” 

“What was that?” Yaz asks, breathless. 

“Little telepathic intrusion, searching recent memories. No specifics, I’d never be so impertinent, just an answer.” She pivots away, putting her hands on her pockets and looking down at the floor. “Your head is full of uncertainty and,” she turns to Yaz with a mocking grin, “how sweet, you’re waiting for her to rescue you.”

Yaz glowers in response. “What did you find?”

“Nothing of use, as you’ll be happy to hear.” She resumes her pacing. “The Judoon located the fugitive at the cathedral you had in mind hours ago.”

“Oh, and she got away?” Yaz asks teasingly. The woman stops and looks at her, embittered. “Yeah,” Yaz whispers, grinning wide. “Let me tell you something – she’s going to keep on escaping. She’s brilliant at it, one of her best party tricks. You’ll never catch her, and soon enough she’ll come here.” Yaz pauses for a moment, lowering her voice and narrowing her eyes, “and you’d better be ready to run.” She tries not to think about the fact that she sounds like a kid in the schoolyard telling a bully that her big brother is going to beat them up. 

The woman looks afraid, but only for a moment. A smile spreads across her face and she laughs, high-pitched and cackling, shattering the illusion. “If she comes here, she’s finished. This is a Judoon ship, expertly shielded against any foreign tech.” She softens her expression. Dark, demure eyes and a soft smile stitched with mocking pity. “But your faith in her is very quaint.” She swings around and approaches the stasis field once more. “You really weren’t lying earlier, you’re just ignorant. Totally oblivious.” She seems to delight in watching the frown that deepens upon Yaz’s face. “It was foolish of her to abduct humans while on the run, but it seems that she just can’t help herself.” She reaches up her hand, revolving her wrist and flexing her pointed fingers. It’s obvious that you’ve travelled in a TARDIS of some description, the atron trail you reek of is far too neat and tidy to have been left by a vortex manipulator. You’re disgusting,” she murmurs, bringing her face close, nose almost touching the plane of pleated, voltaic white between them.

“Excuse me,” Yaz spits, gaze turned up at the woman. 

“Tangled,” she hisses. “Messy, manipulated, violated. You’re covered in artron energy like a surface left abandoned, collecting dust.” For the second time, her hand passes through the wall of light. Yaz eyes it bracingly. “Your life is jumbled, twisted. Paradox slathered upon paradox, hinging around you, revolving.” The woman takes a dark curl of Yaz’s hair, a collection of strands pulled loose from her meticulous braids. She sweeps it aside, brushing a finger minutely against Yaz’s forehead. For a spit instant, a spark of heat crackles against her skull, rocketing from the woman’s fingertip. “So many loose threads hanging,” she whispers with a smirk. “It’s a wonder you’re held together at all, Yasmin Khan.” 

No need to ask how she knows her name. Yaz felt her fingers in her mind. “What are you talking about?” Yaz asks, through gritted teeth. 

“The _Doctor,_ she sneers, “has a track record for interfering in the established, optimal time line.” She draws back, pulling her arm out of the field of force still surging waves of cold through Yaz’s body. “You are just another casualty, and just look at the mess,” she tuts. The mischievous glint in her eyes catches the red light overhead, a crimson star. “I suppose I should apologise, on behalf of our agency. The Doctor’s apprenhendment is our responsibility, seeing as she’s a former operative.”

“The Doctor used to work for you?” Yaz asks, incredulous.

The woman smiles bitterly, a shrewd expression pulling at her lips as she turns away. “Wouldn’t that have been nice. She was my superior officer.”

“You’re chasing after your superior officer?”

“She defected, among… other things,” she mutters, reticent. “That’s protocol.” the woman explains, now resuming her idle pacing about the small, dark room. “It was foolish of the coordinators to ever try to coerce her into employment, to give her access to the innermost sanctums of the Matrix. She’s a known troublemaker. What a surprise it was when she set about further cementing her damable reputation. She deserted her squad, and went into hiding.” The woman is no longer addressing Yaz, the prisoner may as well be invisible. When prompted, it seems that the Doctor’s former subordinate is more than happy to talk out her frustrations. She paces back and forth in front of the stasis field, hands clasped behind her back and face lost in a mask of contempt. Yaz is almost sympathetic. A proud, to-the-book type forced to adapt to the Doctor’s chaotic, unorthodox leadership style. Yaz remembers what the Doctor told her, Ryan and Graham when they finally forced her to answer some of their questions. She mentioned stealing a TARDIS and running away. Is this the agency that she ran away from? The story doesn’t quite fit, because the Judoon tracked the fugitive to Gloucester, and the Doctor just happened by when they launched their illegal investigation. Maybe it was all an elaborate trap to lure her from her ship. Unauthorised alien invasion of Earth. That’d do it. 

For a moment, the room is left silent but for the low yawning of the engines and the tinny, static whine of Yaz’s space-age prison cell. Her captor stands by the window, puffed white sleeves pooling around thin wrists. 

“Are you from Gallifrey too?” Yaz asks. If she’s lucky, she might get more answers out of her than from the Doctor, who’s supposed to be her friend. Telling, that. 

The woman turns to face Yaz, looking for a moment as if she isn’t going to answer. “Yes,” she says curtly, and turns back to face the window. Behind her back, her fingers fidget. Restless, nervous. Eager to get going and move on. Yaz would be fidgeting too, if she could. Her face itches, and in her bubble of slick, heady chill, she feels as if she is withering away from inaction. 

“D’you have a name?”

Dimly, Yaz can see the woman’s reflection in the sheen of the window glass, stars dotted across a muted complexion. She narrows her eyes in suspicion. “I do.” 

“What is it?”

“It is unimportant.” Yaz resists the urge to make a very obvious joke. 

“I’ve got no information for you, what are you waiting for? Unless your threats were totally baseless.”

The Gallifreyan woman turns her head minutely, so that her angular profile is highlighted by the bright red above the window. Aquiline nose and sharp chin. “You will be reintegrated into your appropriate time and place once this matter has been dealt with. No point calling in backup just for you.”

“So, waiting then,” Yaz sighs. “If you’re planning on keeping me locked in this thing until you find the Doctor, then, sorry mate but you’ll be waiting a long time.” The woman doesn’t respond, gaze fixed upon the stars. “You could always let me out,” Yaz offers casually, “seeing as I’m just some stupid human. Not like I could do anything.” Silence again. The woman brings up the comms device on her wrist and starts tapping idly at the screen, looking bored. “Okay,” Yaz groans, rolling her eyes. “Are you going to just stand there, haven’t you got something better to do?” A flash, a surge of heat. The cylinder of luminance surrounding Yaz fizzles away, and with a strangled cry she crumples to the cold metal in a heap. Her captor chuckles lightly, and as Yaz resurfaces, nursing a bruise on her jaw soon to form, she is holding a sharp, manicured hand in front of her mouth in mock surprise. Yaz struggles into a sitting position, pushing her weight up with jellied arms. Her nerves are still numb, her muscles clumsy and ungainly and exhausted. 

“Very funny,” Yaz grunts. 

The woman walks towards Yaz slowly. Yaz fights against her unresponsive muscles, slowly working feeling into every nerve, kneading her fingers into the fabric of her leather jacket, shifting her weight between slowly-waking legs. She watches the woman approach; tall and elegant, heels clicking crisp against the metal underfoot. 

“My name is Gat,” she says, reaching her hand down in offerance. 

Yaz hesitates, keeping her expression vulnerable, her eyes wide. She takes Gat’s hand gingerly, then grips two of her fingers tight, and twists them back with a dull crack. She cries out, and Yaz sweeps one leg out from beneath her and kicks across Gat’s shins, sending her off-balance. Yaz clambers clumsily to her feet as Gat stumbles backwards, clutching her hand. Yaz darts to the door, hoping it isn’t locked, but before she gets more than a step she sees a dark shape surge forwards in her peripheral, and Gat grabs at her with a swift, jabbing movement, pressing her fingertips to Yaz’s neck. Her touch floods Yaz’s nerves with steel, and her bones turn to water, limbs useless at her sides as Gat holds her finger painfully against the pulsing tendons in her neck. 

“Not bad, for a human,” Gat breathes, grinning. Her warm breath drags across Yaz’s neck. “I’m going to let you go now, Yasmin, and there’s no point in fighting.” With a jolt, Yaz feels something cold press against the small of her back. The barrel of an alien blaster. Again. One more to add to the tally board. She’s beating Ryan and Graham by a long shot. 

Yaz feels the gun heat up, a high-pitched warble rumbling through her skin. Yaz’s breath catches in her throat, lungs struggling against her paralysis. “The door won’t open for you anyway.” Gat releases her hold on Yaz, and feeling floods back into her muscles. The gun is still pressed tight against her jacket. 

“Venusian Aikido,” Yaz remarks, catching her breath. “Nice.” 

“Can I put the gun down, or will I have to shoot you?” Gat asks, falsely sweet. 

“I think I’ll go with the former.” 

Gat pulls the gun away and reattaches it to the holster at her hip with a click. “Wise choice.”

Yaz eyes the door shrewdly. No doorknob, no controls, just a black bulb above the panel, no doubt some sort of bioscanner. It doesn’t look as if it’s active. It likely requires remote activation from Gat’s comms unit, since it looks to be the same device used by the Judoon. If she can get to the comms unit, she might be able to figure it out through intuition. Most of these devices are fairly similar. More pressingly, she needs to get that gun off Gat. Yaz feigns disinterest in the exit, glancing surreptitiously at Gat’s holster and how she might be able to wrestle the weapon free. She walks over to the window, feigning disinterest in escape.

With her face pressed close to the glass, and tilting her head to the right, Yaz can just spot the edge of the Earth where it sits in the sky, swollen and blue, a white haze ringing the huge planet. There’s a click against the metal floor as Gat comes to stand beside her, gun holstered on her far side, which can only be deliberate. She is fiddling with her comms device, biting her lip. Nervous, Yaz perceives. Waiting for news. 

“So, you’re from Gallifrey,” Yaz posits idly, “does that mean you’re a Time Lord?” 

Gat’s hands go still, though she doesn’t look up. “I’m flattered, but no,” she mutters, dropping her arm and staring out at the stars. Yaz can read her face well enough to know that she’s struck a nerve. 

“What’s it like there?” 

“Much better than this insignificant backwater.” Up herself, then. Yaz supposes that any planet with people who go around calling themselves Time Lords are bound to be a little self-important. Another stretch of silence. Yaz wonders whether Gat plans to stand by the window until her Judoon foot soldiers call her back to Earth, or the Doctor bursts into the ship to rescue Yaz – whichever comes first. She’s also wondering why Gat deactivated the stasis field in the first place. Yaz suspects that she’s bored, stirring up a bit of trouble just to pass the time. 

“It’s a common misconception,” Gat says flatly, addressing the stars. It takes a few moments for Yaz to realise that the statement is directed at her. 

“What is?”

“That all Gallifreyans are Time Lords. At least, it is among the uninformed, the ones who only hear of Gallifrey through legend.” 

“There are legends?”

She turns to Yaz with narrowed eyes, contemptuous. “Gallifrey is the mightiest civilisation in all the universe.”

“Right,” Yaz mutters under her breath, putting her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. “Of course it is.” 

In her peripheral, she sees Gat’s posture twitch in annoyance, going on the defensive. “The Empire of the Time Lords presides over time itself. Entire universes observed, analysed, and manipulated for the betterment of all species. They are the most powerful race in all creation.” Okay, Yaz thinks, so maybe self-important would be an understatement. It sounds like a speech she’s given a fair few times. Yaz resists the urge to roll her eyes. 

“Except you aren’t one,” Yaz reminds Gat, glaring at her with feigned innocence. Maybe she shouldn’t be insulting her captor. It’s instinct, she thinks, to bring down big talkers like her. She reminds Yaz of the girls that went to the private school the next suburb over, with their strict uniform policy and private bus service. She has the look too; prim and proper, perfect makeup and flawless, shining hair. 

A snarl flashes across Gat’s face. “You have to graduate from the Academy to become a Time Lord.”

“Dropped out, did you?”

“No,” she snaps, and Yaz tries not to look too pleased with herself. Reversed interrogation, now her captor is the one that’s flustered. “You can’t attend unless you’re born into one of the Great Houses, infused with superior genetic abilities. Everything I have achieved,” she straightens her vest, pulling it down over her hips, and exhaling a shaky, levelling breath, “I have done so through merit alone, and against unfavourable odds. And the _Doctor_ ,” she scowls, vitriol clear in every line of her face, “rejected her place amongst the highest and most powerful class of the empire, wasted her gifts, and completely perverted the laws of our people. It’s despicable.” 

“What makes them so different from you?” It’s clear that there is a great deal that this woman needs to get off her chest. Maybe this interrogation will be good for the both of them. For Yaz, information, and for Gat, the catharsis of voicing what sounds like some very deep seated frustrations. Hopefully the Doctor makes it here before the conversation is wiped completely from her mind. 

“Well let’s see,” Gat smiles wryly, her tone sarcastic. She turns away from the window and once again begins to pace. Behind her back, her fingers twist and untwist incessantly. “They can regenerate. Thirteen lives. Most of them live for thousands of years. Heightened telepathic abilities, a far more acute sense of time – to see it stretched out, to follow its paths and warp them in a blink.” There is hunger in her eyes, a deep longing. 

Yaz’s expression winkles in sympathy. “That’s awful,” she says, and she truly means it. It’s disconcerting to think about – the Doctor, a member of a higher class of being, a divide enforced by genetic engineering, widened by science. It sounds sick, backwards. It’s worrying to discover that even what is supposedly the mightiest civilisation in all the universe is wrought with injustice, its populace divided. 

Gat looks taken aback for a split second, but she quickly smooths her expression over into its usual silky malevolence. “It’s the way things must be. Most Time Lords wear their title with pride, rule with grace and intelligence. It is a perfect system.”

“If it’s so perfect, why did the Doctor run away?”

“Because she is lazy, and arrogant,” Gat spits, facing away from Yaz. Anger seems to tighten her every nerve. “A coward, unrepentant, childish, careless – a disgrace to us all.”

A year ago Yaz might have dismissed Gat’s words as the grievances of an envious colleague, but over the past few weeks she has begun to see a side to the Doctor that she doesn’t much like. She thinks back to that very morning, she and Ryan and Graham watching her fervently fiddle with the TARDIS machinery, an expression of utter, bitter focus on her face, run through with a quiet, simmering anger. Going home, on her own. Cutting Yaz short, when she was only trying to be kind, trying to be there for her friend. The Doctor usually loves answering her questions, but Yaz has gotten more information from a woman who up until a moment ago was holding a gun to her back, than the person she considers to be her best friend. 

“What happens if you don’t catch her?” she asks Gat. 

“What?” she turns back to face Yaz, and shakes her head in annoyance. She scoffs, and starts tapping away at her comms device. There’s no conviction in her movements. Action for the sake of it. 

“You’re proper nervous, I can tell.” Quick to anger, pent up adrenaline, all her fiddling and constant checking. “What happens if you don’t find the Doctor?” 

“We will find her.”

“Right,” Yaz mutters. “Hypothetical scenario then. Absolute worst case. You fail, what then?” 

Gat glares at Yaz, and for the very first time she sees a flash of genuine vulnerability, genuine fear, in her eyes. Her answer is quiet, shaky, glossed over with a forced, hard-pressed smile. “Failure is not an option.” 

“Seems harsh,” Yaz mumbles. 

Before Gat is forced to think of a response, there is a dull flash on her comms screen. Her eyes light up with relief. “Finally,” she says.

“What? What did they find?” 

“It seems that the fugitive is on her way.”

“The Doctor’s here?” Yaz asks, overcome with hope. Finally indeed. 

“Don’t look so happy about it, she won’t be leaving.” Gat walks over to Yaz. “Maybe you have proven useful to us after all, Yasmin. Lovely bit of bait.” Gat stretches her fingers towards Yaz’s chin, touching the underside of her jaw, where the soft ache of a bruise is beginning to blossom. Yaz reaches up and grabs Gat’s wrist in one swift movement. Gat smirks, dropping her hand once Yaz releases her grip. “Time for a bit of housekeeping, I think. I’ll do the rest when I get back, and when your Doctor is safely dealt with.” 

Yaz shrinks back on instinct, but soon rights herself. She won’t back away. Gat holds her hand aside Yaz’s head, fingertips teasingly close. “Making me forget?” Yaz asks.

“Just this part, the rest will require far more precision. Apologies for the inconvenience. Protocol, you understand.” She smiles, not apologetic in the slightest.

“And everything will be the way it should be, is that right?” Yaz asks mockingly. 

“Precisely.” Just as Gat is about to seal the touch, Yaz swipes a hand towards the blaster affixed to her belt. Her answering movement is a dark blur. Gat’s other arm snaps across her body, her fingers closing vice-tight around Yaz’s wrist before she can reach the gun. Yaz gasps in surprise. 

Gat tuts softly. “not so fast.” She smiles down at her, and whispers, “goodbye, Yaz.” Two spots of pressure on the side of her head. A bright, hot sting behind her eyes, a vertiguous turn of the stomach, and blackness. 

The proceeding events are caught in snatches, briefly held and barely remembered. Red light, and a sliding metal door. Strong arms holding her, eyes fluttering open to the sight of vibrantly patterned fabric; oranges, pinks, greens. Clear blue and clinical white. For a moment Yaz thinks that she must be in hospital. Her head certainly feels heavy enough, her thoughts jumbled enough. 

Soon, or perhaps much later, she is by the canal with its slimy green residue and rich, muddy stench. The sun is low and golden, its rays dappled through verdant trees. Yaz is supported along the esplanade by a pale grey arm, a shock of blonde hair, a stern, deep-set expression. A sense of reality slowly comes into focus, muscles responding, the stuck, rusted gears in her mind beginning to grind and turn. 

Ryan and Graham run her through a curious encounter with a pleasant, if presumptuous gentleman they were abducted by earlier that day. The Doctor only half-listens, as is her prerogative nowadays. Brooding and dark-eyed beneath the deeping TARDIS lights; orange to blue.

She tells them that they don’t know her, and Yaz agrees, despite Ryan’s kind assertion. He always knows the right thing to say. Amicable, kind, observant. The Doctor smiles, and all is smoothed over. The mess is shoved under the bed. Another alert, and they’re off again, Yaz still swallowing back a persistent surge of nausea and faint exhaustion that she can’t explain. 

The boys ask her what happened with the Judoon after the two of them were spontaneously abducted. Yaz isn’t sure, but she makes up a story that they seem to find convincing enough. Negotiating, as is her game, trying to protect Lee and throw the Judoon off the scent. Looking after the confused, terrified populace. Doing her job. As Yaz spins her tale, the Doctor watches her with narrowed eyes, but doesn’t say anything to contradict her. The fact is, the story she tells is rather appealing. It feels good, and it fits the hole that gapes in the middle of her recent memory, the one she inwardly seems unable to stare directly into. Peripherally noticed, acknowledged, and ignored. Soon enough, the story becomes her reality. The human mind is a clever thing, as apt at self-healing as the muscles and skin encasing it. 

There’s no time to stop and think. The Doctor says that the birds are acting strangely. 

**Gat**

“What did she show you?” the Doctor asks. One of them, the one Gat knows. The other stands to the side, small, fidgeting, her mouth twisted into a small, vindictive smile. The image still plays across Gat’s mind; the scent of smoke, the heat of fire, the screams of millions of dead echoing in the physic subspace. The citadel shattered, its towers blackened to molten spikes. Her home destroyed. 

“I don’t know what trickery this is,” Gat hisses, struggling to keep her voice level. The rifle in her arms is a comfort, and she braces her posture for impact. Her employers requested apprehendment, the imprisonment of the fugitive for the rest of time. They never said she couldn’t squeeze one more life out of the old Time Lord in the process. Along with the shock of the blonde, wiry Doctor’s cruel illusion, Gat feels dizzy, sickened to the core as she stares at the two identical beings occupying the same space. It will be up to her coordinators to sort through this mess. Leave it to the Doctor to make sure her imprisonment hinges around a temporal abomination, and a subsequent bureaucratic nightmare for the Division. 

“Put the gun down Gat,” the Doctor snaps, voice low and commanding. She looks panicked, her dark skin glossed with sweat. Good, Gat thinks. Time she experienced a healthy dose of fear, after everything she has put her through. 

“But it ends here!” Gat cries, priming the weapon. 

“Don’t do this,” the Doctor shouts in desperation. With a grimace, Gat pulls the trigger, and realises too late what the Doctor has done. Always one step ahead, so very clever. A spitting, red inferno blasts back from the rifle in her arms, exploding outwards through her fingertips, up to her hearts. In white heat, she feels her bones incinerate, and her scream has barely sounded before the shock reaches her vocal chords, then her mind. She is atomised. 

And her atoms reassemble. 

A brutal pull of nausea, stinging behind the eyes, tingling in fingertips newly formed, Gat is scattered and remade. For one foolish moment of utter confusion she thinks that she has regenerated. Next, she wonders if the Matrix would bother to simulate all the aches and pains of physicality with such cruel precision for a dead mind. She is lying on rough stone, and the sensation is too sharp to be fabricated. The air is nitrous, the surrounding time flat and dull. Earth. She recognises the bland taste of it. 

The Doctor went to the trouble of not only stealing the majesty of destruction that was her custom-made kronon-engine rifle, but also spliced its firing mechanism with a common short-range teleport. Gat gets to her feet on the crude stone pavings beside a dark-watered canal, and surveys her Judoon comms unit. Primitive technology, but essential for interfacing with the grunts. With a jolt of panic, she sees that it has been completely fried. So, no contacting their ship, which is likely drifting out into interstellar space as she stands here idly. The Judoon are woefully slow, no doubt the Doctor will be able to weasel her way out on some technicality. With two of them, the Judoon don’t stand a chance. Bane of her existence or not, the Doctor is still a Time Lord. 

Gat punches the shattered, smoking remains of her comms unit in frustration, and instead turns to a more reliable source of communication. Tapping the side of her headdress, she initiates telepathic contact with the Division’s Matrix node, allowing her to relay mission critical updates to her coordinators. Rather, she tries to initiate telepathic contact, and finds the mechanism completely unresponsive. The machine woven through the dark bands of her headdress serve as relays, boosting the signal through any nearby folds or snags in space-time and finding the optimal path to the Matrix network on Gallifrey. _Gallifrey_ , she swallows, which stands tall and mighty. It prospers, and will continue to prosper until the last photons in this universe fade into darkness. Time Lord machines are supposedly impossible to tamper with, and once again Gat is forced to admire the Doctor’s genius, which she only ever seems to use in order to make Gat’s life a misery, and to spread as much unadulterated chaos through the universe as she can manage. 

In a last, desperate afterthought, she pulls the staser pistol off her hip and shoots it into the canal. The mechanism jams, the whine of the building charge within dying to a feeble whistle in the warm breeze. Gat lets out a strangled cry of fury, one that sends a flock of dark birds wheeling from the trees overhead. She stamps her foot against the pavings, and the stupid, tiny, empty planet spins indifferent beneath her heel. 

Gat takes a long, drawn breath, calming herself. She feels idiotic; a professional, reduced to hysterics. The Doctor has a way of inciting this sort of reaction in everyone she meets. 

First objective: repair her equipment. Hopefully the wiring has just been left frazzled, and the circuits can be mended simply with the primitive parts available here. Gat gazes up at the sky; cold-hued, puffs of white cloud obscuring a weak, singular sun. Scowling, she walks briskly down the canal-side promenade toward a more densely populated area. 

Gat makes a short journey towards what must be the centre of this piddling town. The soot-spraying vehicles are more concentrated along the grey roadways, banked up at roundabouts and honking their abrasive alarms. Humans meander along the paths by the roadside, and many of them cast her strange looks. It comforts her to know that they will all be dead within a century or less. 

She scans signage for any hint of what she needs – a repair bay or laboratory or factory of some sort. At the very least the Doctor’s thorough blasting of the technology on her person left her translator circuits intact, though the human’s language is dull to look at. Uncomplicated and made entirely of words, not a flash of intent behind them, no hint of telepathically-laced context. 

Gat isn’t sure that it will be worth contacting the Judoon even if she can repair her communicator. If they managed to fulfill their contract with the Division, they would have no motivation to conduct a rescue mission. At present, she is almost certainly presumed dead, and will be reported to the Division as an unfortunate casualty. The complete blackout of her communicators will only confirm the diagnosis. In the likely event that the Doctor managed to escape, it would serve no benefit for the Judoon to pick Gat up either. She’ll have to try and get a message back to Division command through the Judoon, but their strict adherence to orders might prevent the single-minded creatures from straying outside the anticipated course of events. They follow orders to the letter, and they never let a contract go unfulfilled. 

Gat eventually comes to a shoddy, red-bricked building sporting a faded yellow sign that reads _Gloucester Computer Repairs_. It is a fair way from the town centre, and looks deserted. There may well be better equipped facilities within the grey towers and densely-packed buildings further on, but she needs to assess the damage, and get her equipment working as soon as possible. With a resigned sigh, Gat pushes the door open and enters the musty building. A whinging chime rings out above the door, making her wince in annoyance. Old, blue carpeting beneath her feet, thick with dust. A feeble ceiling fan spins lazily, recycling the same, mould-choked, metallic air. Gat wrinkles her nose and gets her bearings; shelves and shelves of junk. The computers look outdated even for the early time period, some semi-functional and on display, but most broken up into components. The posters of advertisements behind the desk by the entrance – the only things inside that look remotely new – advertise eight core processors and two terabyte harddrives. This is going to be harder than she thought. 

As Gat traces a finger along the shelves of crudely-assembled, inefficient computer parts, there is a strangled cough from behind her. Gat whips around, resisting the urge to pull out her staser pistol. There’s no need to escalate things quite yet, empty threats or not. She’s jumpy, but she can forgive herself for a momentary lapse in judgement, given how terribly her day is going so far. 

“Afternoon,” a man says. He is fat and bearded, crumbs spotting his chin. He waves a lumpy hand at her from behind the front desk. His blue polo shirt has a badge that reads _Dale._

“Yes,” she agrees, unsure of the proper procedure. She didn’t bother downloading any information pertaining to human etiquette. She didn’t expect to have to spend more than a few minutes chained to the measly little rock. 

“Can I help you with anything?” 

“I highly doubt it.” She turns up her chin and continues into the shop. There is a set of steps at the end of the room leading down to a lower level. Here there are workbenches topped with lamps and metal tools. The room is ringed with shelves housing plastic boxes of jumbled machine parts, labelled with hardened, yellowing paper. Gat stands at one of the workbenches, picks up a small screwdriver where it has been left on the surface, and sets to work dismantling her Judoon comms device. 

A few minutes later, she has the innards of the primitive machine set out upon the benchtop, and observes with dismay that the Doctor engineered that blast of red, destructive energy to completely melt all the transistors into a molten mess, fraying every wire and blackening the insides of each separate component. It is nothing better now than a hunk of stone strapped to her wrist. Gat tears the device from her arm and throws it onto the carpet, where it lands with an unsatisfying thump. She stamps her sharp boot-heel through its screen, which cracks pitiably, sending sparks of feeble blue up into the air. 

The Matrix interface embedded in her headdress will be less damaged – it has to be, the amount of energy needed to not only fry the circuits, but kill the organic matter encased within, would be astronomical – but she needs better equipment, and more time. Best not to attract attention by sticking around too long. It would be inconvenient to deal with local law enforcement. Gat is a powerful telepath, as are all Division agents, and most Gallifreyans, but she will always be second-class in that regard. In that, and many others. She may not possess the psychic energy to cover her tracks if things get wildly out of hand. 

The Earth sun is beginning to set, casting the sky outside a shade of muted orange that reminds her achingly of home. Gat tries not to picture it burning, but the image is there before that of the thriving city she remembers. She should head to her dearly departed comrade’s chosen safe house along the canal – up until recently, the home of an unassuming humans couple called Ruth and Lee Clayton. It’s almost offensive to think that the Doctor actually _became_ human in her effort to escape her chequered past. Cells aging so rapidly, so very breakable and small and dull. She almost feels sorry for the so-called Lee, who had to see his revered mentor in such a sorry state. Perhaps he didn’t mind it, given the intimacy of their falsified relationship. And to think, Gat actually shed a tear at his funeral. 

If her old friend kept his service medal, then it’s likely he kept some other effects from home. Whether out of sentimentality or necessity, they might be useful. There’s got to be a Chameleon Arch somewhere too, an incredible piece of engineering, with plenty of useful parts inside. Time Lord technology to attract Time Lord attention. She just has to hope that she is deemed important enough to rescue. After all, failure was never an option. 

Resolutely, Gat rifles through the plastic boxes of computer parts, looking for anything that she might be able to use. She pulls one of the grey cartons out and upends it on the carpet with a deafening crash of metal on metal. She throws some screwdrivers and other useful tools from the workbenches surrounding into the bottom of the box, and then sets about leafing through the rest of the junk. 

There’s a rumble of muted footsteps above her; someone coming down the stairs. The fat man blunders down to the shop floor, looks around, and spots Gat standing in the middle of his workshop, hands halfway inside a box of processors sealed in plastic containers. 

“Hey, what are you doing back there!” he cries, running over, a thunderous expression clouding his reddened face. He really is quite large; a fair few inches taller than Gat, and at least twice her weight. He’s likely labouring under the delusion that he has the advantage as he stomps down the steps to the workshop. Gat straightens up, processors abandoned, and gazes at him flatly. “This area isn’t for customers – you realise you’re going to have to pay for this damage!” The man towers over her, chest heaving and wearing an expression that he must regard as menacing. 

Gat tilts her head to one side, glowering at him. “I’m trying to repair a device that is more complex than anything you could hope to comprehend, little man, so I suggest you get out of my way.” 

He blinks blankly, and chuckles to himself. “You what?” 

“I’ll be on my way,” Gat says briskly, going back to her business of sorting through this human’s poorly-curated heap of glorified garbage. 

“Err, no you won’t, love,” he says, and he reaches out to grab her by the arm. Gat doges his gasp with ease and pokes a deft finger to his neck, quickly taking out his surrounding muscles and sending a paralysing shock down his spine, rooting him to the spot, unable to speak. The same trick twice in one day. She should probably make an effort to be more creative. 

Gat presses her eyes shut, sighing laboriously before glaring at the man with vitriol. “I have had a _highly_ disappointing day and am in need of the spare parts you keep in this facility. Actually, I’m in need of some highly sophisticated equipment that will never grace your watery speck of a planet for as long as it exists, in any conceivable timeline, but I’m going to have to make do with what you’ve got.” She twists her nails into his flesh. “Understood?” 

Unable to respond, she takes his compliance as a given and releases her hold. As he catches his breath, Gat throws a few of the higher-calibre processors into her crate. She hears the man behind her back away. Peripherally, she watches him pull a thin rectangular device from the back pocket of his jeans. An artificial clicking sound emanates from it as he taps the screen. 

Gat turns to see the man holding the device to his ear, backed away to the top of the stairs. 

“Calling for reinforcements, are we?” she teases, walking towards him. “No, I don’t think so.” She dodges his feeble attempts to block her attack and japs a finger to his forehead. Psychic shock, which she may have slightly overdone, but she can’t be blamed for being a little on edge, given the circumstances. He will live, probably. 

Gat leaves the electronics repair shop holding her box of curated parts as the sun sinks below the grey cityscape. Just a hint of orange in the industrial haze, giving way to a black, starless night. The clouds have descended, blocking all view of the surrounding galaxy, and the universe beyond it. 

When she arrives at the Doctor’s abandoned safe house, nestled away in a quiet neighbourhood of uniform bricked housing blocks, the sky is black. The canal ripples along steadily in the biting breeze, splashes of gold striking its surface from the sparse placings of street lamps along the promenade. Young humans in oversized, dark clothing loiter about, smoking foul-smelling substances, and she passes a pair of inebriated, staggering men that guaff at her and slur out a number of base remarks. Gat resists the urge to kill them, strong as it may be. This planet really is a dump. 

The door to the fugitive’s thirty-year hiding place is unlocked, just as she left it. There is still a static buzz in the air where the atoms of the man this planet called Lee Clayton hang, permeating through the atmosphere. Gat opens one of the thickly-glazed windows to make sure his remains are suitably scattered throughout the pitiful tomb he chose for himself. She sets her box of stolen goods on the dining table and begins her search of the house. 

There are pictures showing the two of them – Lee and Ruth – living out their lives bio-shielded and Chameleon-Arched respectively. They grow old so very quickly, frame by frame, and in each of them smiling. The Doctor, in every one, looks out with an empty stare, a suffocated mind. At least she understood the gravity of the situation, just how hard the High Council would work to find her after what she did. She took the threat seriously, it was just a shame for her that Lee was the sentimental sort, and kept his old service medal hidden in this very house, radiating its steady, unmissable Gallifreyan signal. Did part of him want to be found, Gat wonders, just so he could give up this sad, boring existence, and deactivate the bioshield that was degrading him so readily into a human corpse? More likely he was just a fool. He always was devoted to the Doctor, completely. 

Gat finds the service medal in the draw where Lee left it, tucked away in that silver box, carved by the hands of a Gallifreyan artisan. She takes the medal in her palm, relishing in the story encased within its molecules, tetrahedral structures knitted together in perfect, resonant harmony. She stares into the orange jewel encrusted upon its sleek body – to represent the pristine glow of the citadel itself. She has one of her own, back home. Burning, she remembers, and blocks the memory out. Gat clasps her fist around the broach until it hurts, and throws the medal to the ground as hard as she can. It isn’t damaged, not a chip or a scratch. Gallifrey is just as unbreakable, the citadel just as eternal and impregnable as that softly-glowing orange jewel. 

There are no other Gallifreyan artifacts in the house, and no Chameleon Arch. There must be some secondary location, to prevent the disguised Doctor from discovering the device by accident. 

Gat smashes every photograph on the mantelpiece and, having satisfied her burst of rage, removes her headdress and sets upon the likely impossible task of repairing whatever damage the Doctor has inflicted upon her only remaining link to her employers. In the silence of the old house, without the hum of idling engines or the faint chatter of psychic interference, her thoughts are left to wander. Try as she might to flush the image from her mind, they wander back to Gallifrey. 


	2. Stranded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gat is having difficulty adjusting to life on Earth. That is to say, she isn’t. When she detects a surge of Artron energy in Sheffield, she goes to investigate.  
> Someone is stalking Yaz, either that or she’s going crazy. After losing the Doctor, she’s struggling to move on with her mundane life. That is to say, she isn’t. When she is confronted by a possibly-alien psychopath, she can’t help but feel relieved at the return to normalcy.

**Gat**

A shrill ding jolts Gat to attention, and she sits up straight at the dining table where she was beginning to doze. The wooden surface is cluttered with cannibalised machinery; a haphazard mess of half-working instruments knotted together from the junk she found at the electronics repair shop, dismantled kitchen appliances from the house, and a few precious pieces of Time Lord technology that she was able to salvage from the lighthouse nearby. The supposed secret location wasn’t difficult to find. It was marked rather obviously in a map that Lee kept in his bedroom drawer. There, Gat found the abandoned Chameleon Arc and a stash of deactivated Division-issue weaponry. From the top of the tower, a foreign breeze battering her hair, a view out to a grey sea, the Earth was almost nice to look at. Almost. 

It’s been three weeks. 

During that time, Gat has managed to construct a sensor – a radar of sorts, rigged to detect any hint of active alien technology, particularly of the Gallifreyan variety. It’s something of an area of expertise for Gat, since she made it a personal mission of hers to track her former colleagues after their disappearance. Rather unfairly, the responsibility of their capture had fallen to her. In her opinion, it shouldn’t fall to subordinates to reign in their rogue superiors, even if the offending incident, in an obtuse sense, was said subordinate’s fault. A momentary lapse in judgement, a misplacing of trust – that was all it took – and look where it’s landed her. Gat will never make that mistake again. 

The sensor is piled up in a cascading, precarious stack of dark plastic components and trailing loops of wire. Motherboards and microchips hang exposed, the repurposed integrants of countless devices woven and soldered into a hot, heaving mass. The table it rests on is charred in places with rings of dark, singed wood. It was polished to a glossy sheen upon arrival. The vase of flowers that sat upon it still lies shattered upon the tiles, sad, wilted begonias and all. 

Gat has routed a desktop monitor to the machine, and it displays a series of complex, oscillating graphs, hacking into the signals propagated by overhead satellites and cellular towers. The atmosphere of this planet is a soup of electromagnetic information, everything from meteorological data to pop music beamed from machine to machine. Harnessing these signals, Gat’s device trawls through a constant, mouldering stream of data; atmospheric pressure, temperature, weather, radioactivity, soundwaves. Anything anachronistic triggers an alert, in accordance with the parameters she has set. 

Essentially, it goes ding when there’s stuff. 

Gat surveys the monitor, looking at the readings that caused the recent alert. What she sees is very promising indeed. A surge of heat and radiation, an influx of pressure, an anomalous twist of gravity. It all points to some temporal mishap, a flood of artron energy – though Earth’s primitive technology is unable to define it as such. Somewhere nearby, a TARDIS has landed. 

Gat smiles to herself where she sits, back hunched and knees pulled up to her chest. There’s a packet of carbohydrate-based, sugar-heaped discs sitting on the dining table next to the machine, which Gat has been begrudgingly enjoying. Substanceless, and far too sweet, but the rush of adrenaline is good for staying awake. She takes a bite of one of them, and attempts to trace the exact location of the newly-landed TARDIS by narrowing her search parameters. 

Her machine has detected a spike in extra-terrestrial once before, about two weeks prior. First, there was a TARDIS signal someway north, though her device was primitive at that stage, and she was unable to get a more specific reading than that. It appeared for a minute or so before equalising in a similar surge of energy. At the time, Gat was almost certain it was the Doctor. No one else would bother to visit this backwater planet during such an uninteresting time in its history. Most likely, she has decided to make a return trip. 

Gat suspects that she has been observing the activities of the smaller, blonde incarnation – which of course suggests that the current course of time favours the Doctor evading custody, irritating as that is. The fact that this future incarnation didn’t remember Gat at least suggests that the authorities caught up with her eventually, and carried out the necessary bureaucratic procedures. That Doctor, as Gat realised when she learned that there were two of them, must have been the one that Yasmin Khan is affiliated with. That being the case, the Doctor is bound to return to Earth to drop off her cherished human, or abduct some more if her current batch gets tired out, or worn through completely. If Gat can get her hands on the Doctor’s TARDIS, she might finally be able to get back home. 

After the initial brief TARDIS signal, Gat was afraid that her prototype machine would break. It began churning out nonsensical data, reading off electromagnetic signals from Earth’s satellites that were incongruent with the laws of this universe, and entirely impossible. Either her shoddy machine was malfunctioning in its early stages, or there was some force beyond the universe troubling itself to interfere with the piddling affairs of Earth. The former, though it pained her to admit, was far more likely. 

After that, silence for another week. Silence, and mounting despair until now.

Studying the triangulation of the anomalous signals, Gat traces the location of the TARDIS to around the same area as the first reading. Even if the signal disappears again, Gat knows that the same ship – the Doctor’s stolen ship – is likely to return periodically. When it does, she’ll be ready. 

According to local geographical data, it is in a place called Sheffield. Gat grins to herself and gets up from the dining table. It’s time she left this house. 

During her three weeks marooned on Earth, Gat has made the place her own, meaning that she has thoroughly wrecked every inch of it. She finds the act cathartic, especially when she thinks about her two ex-colleagues living here for so long, hiding in their dull, fragile shells. The Doctor, guilty without even knowing it. 

Gat is still wearing the dark trousers of her uniform, but her white blouse was stained soon after her arrival. No doubt the humans have some archaic arrangement for washing clothes, but she hasn’t bothered herself with discovering it. Laundry isn’t something that she has ever been required to consider. She reluctantly raided Lee’s wardrobe soon after her arrival, finding Ruth’s collection of garish colours and patterns disagreeable. His collection of plain shirts, though oversized, were at least practical. It pained her physically to put them on. 

Gat starts to gather her things, in preparation for her journey. Well, Lee’s things, but she won’t spare a thought of guilt for dead traitors. 

During her stay, Gat has been utterly focused on finding a way home. As such, concepts such as hygiene and organisation have fallen by the wayside. Her hair has slipped from its tight, high ponytail. Strands of black streaked with red hang loose and greasy, trailing off-course in tufts and tameless strands. She’s washed the makeup off her face, and although her superior biology overrides the need for food or sleep, her diet of biscuits paired with a complete lack of rest has left her looking haggard. There are dark circles under her eyes, a persistent ache through her spine, and a constant buzzing in her nerves. One night spent tinkering and programming and scouring through swaths of data led swiftly to another, the weeks creeping up with unrelenting persistence. It’s a curious effect that she had yet to experience elsewhere; time’s indifferent conquest. It’s bland, linear course is near-maddening, and Gat finds her sense of reality beginning to slip. She doesn’t understand how the humans deal with it. 

Gat consults Lee’s side of the wardrobe for a final time, picking out a brown trench coat to replace her uniform jacket, its studded red shoulders and golden lining sure to stick out amongst popular human attire. She empties a canvas bag from the foot of the bed, packed with a few sets of clothes and other essentials. A quick getaway, if his pursuers ever caught up. It seems he never got the chance to use it. 

Gat checks the monitor in the dining room, and sees that the aftershock of Artron energy lingers. The TARDIS is still waiting. She won’t be able to pack the entire machine with her – it’s too large, wired into the generators and satellite antenna of the housing block. When she arrives, she will have to rely on her senses to trace the temporal anomaly, palpable at a closer range. If all goes to plan, it will lead Gat to the Doctor, and her fabled blue box. The sensor secures a tighter focus on the signal – a suburb called Hallamshire. With the primitive technology she is limited to, she won’t be able to get more precise than that. 

Once her sensor was complete, or as optimal as it could be without proper parts, Gat was forced to find other ways to entertain herself. She tried reading, but found the human language horrendously dull. Words printed on page after page, missing the telepathic dimension that she was used to. The only book she has found any comfort in is a journal belonging to the human Doctor, full of scribbled entries and sketches, jumbled snippets of reality. Memories mistaken for vivid, nonsensical dreams. Within, Gat recognises experiences they shared during their time as Division operatives, and even finds her own face rendered rather unflatteringly upon the page. A recurring character in her nightmares. 

In Lee’s duffel bag, Gat packs the useful remnants of the Chameleon Arc, dismantling her marvel of engineering to do so. It’s bound to come in useful, and could be dangerous – drastically time-altering, in fact – if it were to fall into human hands. She also packs the Division weapons, the last two packets of biscuits from the pantry, a few of Lee’s shirts, and the map she found in his bedroom. Before she tucks it inside, she finds Hallamshire and circles it. 

Gat almost forgets the husk of her Matrix communicator, lying open and thoroughly dissected upon a small table in the living room. The damage done to the communicator in her headdress is more extensive than she thought possible. For the Doctor, the categories of possible and impossible are more often than not up for debate, much to Gat’s chagrin. Not only have the technological components of the communicator been thoroughly fried, but the biological matter has been withered and charred to a black, dead thing, not a synapse left intact. Completely useless. Unless she happens upon some spare dregs of telepathic circuitry, she won’t be able to repair it. She doubts that the Doctor will be willing to lend scraps of her ship to repair a device that would allow Gat to call in the cavalry – in fact, she isn’t sure if the Doctor will help her at all.

She’s been left behind, forgotten, and the worst of it is that even if she by some miracle were able to contact her employers, they might not bother to make the trip. She’s no Time Lord. Within the next two or three centuries, she will be dead. If they were to make the trip, she would be lucky to keep her job. As for her memories… well, there’s no point in deluding herself. It’s not as if anything all that exciting has happened while she’s been here

Memories are malleable, and dangerous, and subject to constant change. It is a way to punish the disobedient, to guard against the anomalous, to improve the loyal. 

In the Doctor’s case, it seems to have served as all three. 

Gat isn’t sure whether the fact that the Doctor’s memory has been completely wiped of their time together in the Division will make her more or less agreeable. They were almost friends once. Gat isn’t sure if it was a remnant of that old friendship, or just a stubborn streak of mercy, that stopped the Doctor from rigging her weapon to teleport instead of backfire outright. 

Best case scenario, she finds the ship unattended. That way, Gat doesn’t have to see the woman’s twisted, vindictive smile. Gat never wants to look into those dark, bitter eyes again, and hear the voice that spat those impossible words;  _ you are only serving at the glory of ash and bone.  _

There’s another reason that Gat hasn’t been sleeping. Waiting for her sensor to pick up any alien signals, if would have been beneficial, logically speaking, for her to get some rest, but she is too scared to dream. She knows she will see Gallifrey burning. The image lurks behind her eyes, waiting for her to rest. 

As Gat is wrapping her dismantled communicator in one of Lee’s shirts, there is a knock at the door. With a groan, she drops the bag to the carpet and shuffles dejectedly to answer the door. She knows who it will be. 

The housing block is connected to the adjacent dwelling of an old human woman that seems to have deemed it her personal duty to check up on Gat nearly every day. She has wiped the old woman’s memory at least three times in the hope that she might stop coming, which only led to having to relay her decided-upon cover story all over again. Gat tried ignoring the knocking, at which point the crone started yelling through the door. 

During her stay, Gat has found out just how fully Ruth and Lee integrated themselves into the local culture. She has had to turn away a number of visitors; delivery-men, colleagues asking after Lee, friends wondering where the couple have gone to. Gat turned them around quickly enough, with a jolt of confusion or a quick examination of their mind to find an excuse they would be likely to accept. The easiest excuse for their minds to digest.

“Gat, dear, are you in there?” the old woman calls. Gat hasn’t bothered to archive her name. She could quite easily flood the woman’s mind with a volley of psychic energy, send her back to her unit in a daze, or worse. The thing is, she would really rather not walk all the way to Hallamshire, and has no desire to learn how to operate human vehicles. Besides, stealing one might draw attention to herself. 

“Yes,” Gat replies. “Coming.” Gat opens the front door and plasters on her best smile. This planet exhausts her. 

“Good morning, dear,” the old woman beams. Her lips quiver, straining against old, withering muscles. The woman is under the impression that Gat is engaged in something called ‘house-sitting’ for Ruth and Lee while they’re on holiday. “Now, are you alright? I’ve been hearing some very strange noises coming through the walls these past few days.” 

Gat is fairly certain that she’s made up an excuse for this already, but she might have wiped her memory since. “Yes, sorry about that,” she mutters. “I’ve been building some… equipment. A computer.”

“Oh, how nice. Did you know, my son is a computer engineer?” They have definitely already had this conversation. “If you’re having any trouble, I can call him round. I’m sure he could show you a useful trick or two.” 

“That’s alright, I won’t be here for much longer.”

“Oh? Ruth and Lee heading, back are they?” 

Gat smiles sweetly and tilts her head. “I don’t expect they ever will.” 

“Oh,” she chuckles, “you’re very funny dear. You kids and your jokes, they fly right over my head.”

“I need to get to Hallamshire, in Sheffield. Is there some sort of transport I can arrange?”

“All the way to Yorkshire, dear, that’s quite the journey. her voice shudders on its way out. “Yes, I expect you’ll be wanting to catch the train. The Glouscheter station is a short walk away. I take the train over to London with my grandchildren quite often, and –” In her sunken eyes, the woman’s loneliness is plain. A decomposing human, soon to return to dust. It’s pitiful to witness. Maybe the disgust and twinge of sympathy Gat felt watching her was similar to what a Time Lord might feel, looking down upon someone like her. 

When thoughts such as these occur to her, she quickly suffocates their spread. If she thinks upon her home too long, she sees flames. 

Gat interrupts the middle of what would surely have been a long and tedious anecdote. “And do I need payment – credits or something?” Lee likely had some local currency on him, but Gat’s fairly certain that all of Lee’s personal effects were vaporised when she shot him. 

“Yes there’s a fee. I’d expect it would be quite expensive for such a long trip. Why don’t you use my railcard? It gives you a discount.” The old woman bustles away before Gat can tell her not to bother. She’s sure she can deceive her away around some human train operators. While the woman presumably searches for her railcard, Gat boots up Lee’s laptop – one device she has left mostly whole due to its usefulness. The password is their squad’s old callsign. So much for security. It took her awhile to decipher how to use the primitive machine, but she soon finds the interface through which humanity’s databases can be searched. Something called Google. She looks up the Gloucester railway station and quickly memorizes its position. She looks up a map of Hallamshire, and memorizes that too. 

The old woman returns with her railcard, and excitedly tells Gat that it will give her a 30% discount on tickets. The woman’s leathery skin brushes against Gat’s as she takes the card from her, and Gat, unguarded, is struck with a tirade of emotion. Grief mingled with pride, a deep, aching loneliness. Gat jerks her hand backwards in alarm, but covers the reaction with a grateful smile. She needs to be more careful. 

On Gallifrey, one must always have their guard up. It’s essential, with the psychic backlog fizzling through the air. Touch is a rare act, and preceded by a preamble of fortifications. In the Division, emotional anonymity is taken to new extremes. Expressions are blank, walls thick, minds devoid of passion and substance. In her time away, Gat has allowed her walls to degrade, and with no dash of emotion or flash of memory waiting to spring forth from the empty air, she’s had no incentive to maintain them. 

“Are you alright dear?” the woman asks, eyes crinkled with concern. 

“Yes,” Gat mutters, opening her expression. Their small thoughts disorientate her, buzzing about her face like irksome flies. “Thanks for the railcard.” 

“Have fun with your computer games!” the woman calls cheerily. Gat flashes her a hurried half-smile and shuts the door. 

Before she leaves, Gat decides to pack the Doctor’s journal and Lee’s service medal. She tells herself that the Doctor might want them, if Gat has the misfortune of running into her. In reality, she needs something to remind her of home besides the dark smoke and licks of flame that have tainted every memory of it.

**Yaz**

Yaz is being followed. 

It’s been going on for two days now – at least, that’s when she first noticed it. Yaz is standing in line at the coffee shop, up far earlier than she needs to be considering that she’s still on sabbatical. Friday, which the old Yaz might have been upset about, because weekends meant being left to her own devices, her antagonistic thoughts. For the new Yaz, it’s just another day to spend at a certain house amongst the quaint drudgery of Hallamshire suburbia, trying to work out how to fly a TARDIS. 

But someone is following her, so maybe she should be careful where she goes. 

Yaz keeps looking around at the grey street beyond the coffee shop windows, the asphalt covered in a silver sheen from overnight rain, reflecting thick clouds and splashes of golden streetlamps, still switched on in the pale dawn. There’s a dark shape standing just outside the window, she’s sure of it. Absently, Yaz rubs her hands together, breathing warmth into her palms. The tip of her nose is cold, and she tries to concentrate on that as the hair on the back of her neck straightens out, and a shiver ripples down her spine. A dark shape in the corner of her eye. She looks without looking, eyes cast askance. Someone is calling her name, and it makes her heart leap out of her chest. 

Right. Coffee order. She shakes away her delusions, and goes to the counter. 

It’s early, her brain is probably still half asleep. Probably that’s all it is, except that this paranoia has been following her for days. 

Yaz didn’t tell Ryan and Graham about her suspicions the previous day, when they invited her round for lunch and asked if she was doing okay. She’d been jumpy, squinting through the sheer, floral-patterned curtains of the front window twice a minute. At the time, she remembers thinking it was a bit of a stupid question. The Doctor sent them all back to Earth and walked off to confront the Master, holding a detonator with enough power to destroy all life in the secluded bubble universe that encased the ruined planet where she was born, with the full intent to press the trigger. The Doctor is dead. Of course Yaz isn’t okay. 

Yaz didn’t tell them because she knows that they would have chalked it up to some sort of elaborate coping mechanism. Inventing danger just to give herself a reason to investigate. Playing pretend, to imitate the old game. They would never put it quite so patronisingly, so cruel. They would probably say something almost painfully kind about dealing with this together – about staying strong and moving on, united. It’s easy for them, she thinks spitefully. They’ve done this before. 

Yaz leaves the coffee shop with her eyes trained resolutely forwards, because there’s no one there. Dawn breaks over grey cinder blocks, a sulphur yellow haze struggling murky through dregs of dark clouds. It’s early – even earlier than she used to get up for work, despite the fact that she was always the first to arrive from her probationary group. Yaz hasn’t been sleeping well. Better to be out in the muted morning bustle than staring up at the ceiling, trying not to remember the face of a mutilated man, half-covered in the rusted machinery welded to his skin. Trying not to remember the strung-out, putrid flesh they found inside the suits of Cybermen, and the smell, when she climbed inside. 

She gets into her car – a new purchase she made with her parents sometime before her fourth Secondment. It seems like years ago, before the Master, before the Doctor began to grow distant from them all. For the world, it’s been just over a month. 

There’s something in the rearview mirror, that same dark, formless shape. It’s like her eyes don’t want her to notice the figure. Shielded chameleon-like by crowds of commuters and grey sky blurred into the cement. A sad, urban parody of an ocean horizon. Yaz’s eyes skirt over the misshapen dent in the air, wandering away of their own accord. From all her stolen glances, she’s built up a hazy image of her stalker; dark clothes, slight frame, stooped gait. It has to be alien. It’s either alien, or she’s going insane. Here’s hoping for the former. 

Yaz drives towards the street where the TARDIS landed, blending in with its suburban surroundings far more innocuously than a police telephone box. She hopes that alien shadows are slower than cars. 

Yaz wasn’t able to visit the TARDIS yesterday, much to her annoyance. She was dragged along on errands with her Mum, which, as it turned out, was just a cover story for a much-anticipated, arduous interrogation. Why did she cancel her travel plans? Was she planning on going back to work? Was she alright, because her eyes were bloodshot and she looked tired.

Was she alright, because it looked like she’d been crying.  _ If things are getting bad again, you need to tell me.  _

The questions were ceaseless, the care and concern putridly palpable. Yaz did her best to reel off optimal excuses, those that were believable but would also keep the conversation as short as possible. It was important that the conversations were short, because the longer she talked, the more Yaz felt like crying.

Her mum is trying her best, even bought her some new earrings while they were out at the shopping centre, but Yaz can’t find it within herself to reciprocate the effort. Her parents have missed her, and they tell her how proud they are of the work she’s been doing for those classified agencies that Yaz can’t talk about – the tap on the shoulder, documentation fabricated with alarming ease. With jarring finality, she is back amongst her Dad’s experimental recipes and Facebook conspiracies, her Mum’s nagging and late-night soaps, her sister’s annoying voice, trying to convince Yaz to move out for good so she can claim her bedroom permanently. 

As she drives, Yaz turns on the radio. Top charts, because Sonya has been driving her car again. It’s better than silence. 

They’ve been home for a week. Her sabbatical has been cut short, as have Graham and Ryan’s prearranged holidays. They seem to be adjusting well to the new normal. The old normal, really, but mundanity is so far from Yaz’s new sense of reality that it feels foreign to her, settling back into time running in-order, to appointments never postponed, the light of the same sun everyday. The same people. She’s already beginning to remember why she wanted to get away from her family. 

The O’Brien-Sinclair residence is more crowded than usual nowadays, with Ravio, Ethan, and Yedlani joining the household. The three of them were quiet at first, wracked by survivor’s guilt. They looked upon their ancient world so full of people with hope and apprehension. They were struggling through an ordeal of their own, adjusting to British suburbia, but Yaz couldn’t find the energy to extend a helping hand. She was too busy breaking all on her own. 

Yaz spent the first day with them at Graham’s, tight-lipped, her mind reeling with possibilities, waiting for the wheeze of a blue box to pull her out of the dark. They drank tea, cup after cup in heavy silence. They tied the Doctor’s rainbow scarf around a tree in Graham’s backyard. A nice one; tall, thick, a gnarled, spiral-grooved trunk. Old and wise. Graham got them to say a few words, treat it like a proper funeral.

Yaz didn’t cry until that night, when she returned home far too early. She cried quite a bit, admittedly, and did the same the night after that. 

Graham and Ryan keep her regularly updated, checking in. They tip-toe around her coiled temper as if on eggshells, worried that she might snap in a vain effort to hide her pain. Yaz finds it easier to be angry than sad. They concentrate on getting their tag-along future humans settled into life in the 21st century. Being experts in space-age mechanics, born and raised to combat cyber tech, the three of them are planning on joining Ryan in getting a proper qualification. They don’t technically exist, and Yaz suspects that there will be a fair few problems that come with popping into existence without any records, but they can deal with all that when they come to it. 

If the Doctor comes back, she can sort them out proper. If not, at least they’re alive. 

Yaz tries not to think about the future of humanity and how she has seen it end in an interstellar war that drove the species to extinction. It may well be that the trio they brought back with them are the only ones left, now living in the past. Technically, that future human race is extinct. The Doctor always used to tell them that time could be rewritten, except when it couldn’t, and she seemed to be the only one able to tell the difference between one case and the next. Time Lord, Yaz supposed it was part of the job description, or perhaps the species name. The Doctor never did explain it. 

Death by climate change, death by cyber-war – their possible, probable futures were bleak. Futures that Yaz wouldn’t live to see, because she would live out her little, meandering, boring human life in the 21st century, waiting for cataclysm, else living beneath the degraded, barely-functional society that is, by her newly-forced frame of reference, designated modern. 

Yaz arrives at the front of what from the outside looks like any other house on the street; red-bricked walls and double-glazed windows covering opaque, cream curtains. The flower beds by the doorstep are a nice touch. They even smell real. 

Yaz makes a quick check for unseeable shadows around her car, and finds something just as exciting. Alarming is probably a better word for it, but the small magnetic device affixed to the back of her car, blinking red and beeping faintly, brings a smile to her face. Alien tracker, almost certainly. Hopefully. It’s messy – a small metal disc with tendrils of sharp wire snaking out from between hastily-welded plating. Yaz picks it up and pockets it. It would be a better idea to throw it down the gutter, but she really,  _ really  _ wants to be found. It could be someone who knows where the Doctor is – a friend, like Jack Harkness, who would likely have better luck than her trying to fly a stolen spaceship. 

Yaz sculls the lukewarm dregs of her takeaway coffee and heads inside the house. 

One kindness that the ship afforded them all was spitting out a key for the front door. A regular house key for a regular house lock, though Yaz suspects that no amount of force on the door and windows would allow entrance. Unanimously, and almost without discussion, the key was entrusted to Yaz. 

Even after so many entrances, the sight of the console room beyond the wooden front door is jarring. Old brick and neatly trimmed lawn giving way to chrome, honeycombed walls and the bright glow of the TARDIS core, bulbs of glass pumping up and down in the cylinder of light. Yaz has been spending most of her free time in the TARDIS – the new, strange, sparse TARDIS, with its clinical blue lights and impersonal, indifferent atmosphere. She always struggled to think of the Doctor’s ship as being alive, but being in a different one makes her appreciate the truth in its absence. There was a certain ambience aboard the Doctor’s vessel, a warm, comforting background hum, the odd click and purr beneath the engine groan and sparkling, crystalline chatter, buzzing electric between its vibrant pillars. She has tried talking to the ship, in the odd moment of desperation, and felt its dense, impenetrable silence like a tangible state of mind. It’s like talking to a brick wall, not the slightest sound in response. Actually, it’s like talking to an inanimate room. She’s probably losing her grip. Graham and Ryan seem to think so, though they haven’t yet voiced the opinion quite so pointedly. 

She’s been left behind, forgotten, and the worst of it is that the Doctor might still be alive. And that sounds downright evil when she voices the thought plainly, doesn’t it? But it hurts, in a different way, to think that the Doctor is still out there in the universe, travelling without them, that Yaz has been abandoned. Grown to comfortable, impertinent. Asking too many questions. 

Already, Yaz has set about convincing herself that the Doctor isn’t dead. It was a theory born of sleepless, teary nights, and a sturdy gut feeling. Her instincts are nearly always right. 

She’s tried discussing it with Ryan and Graham. They seem unsure, but more so they seem to think it doesn’t matter. They are dismissive of discussions of truth – of whether Ko Sharmus made it in time for the Doctor to get away, whether the Doctor, even out of some familiar obligation to them, would ever allow another to sacrifice themselves for her. Ryan in particular likes to avoid the subject. Disenchanted, Yaz thinks. Weak, she tries not to follow up. It’s not a fair thing to think, but she’s been feeling vindictive of late. Needing something to blame, some concrete evidence on which to deny what she can’t bear to be true. 

The logic of her theory is as follows: the Doctor cares about them, if she survived, she will return. She has a time machine, which she’s pretty lousy at steering. A fortnight, and Yaz will allow herself to worry – worry as deeply and viscerally as those first two days – because the more time that passes here, neglected, left behind, the more likely it becomes that the Doctor is either dead, or has moved on. A new set of bright-eyed humans to join her flat-structured-but-not-really team. Maybe they’ll ask less questions. 

She’s been feeling vindictive of late. 

“So,” Yaz says to the dead metal surrounding, “what have you got for me today?” 

Beneath her feet, the engines rumble steadily on, standing by. There’s a short metal stairway leading down to a lower level, with a sealed metal door that must give way to the rest of the ship. Try as she might, Yaz hasn’t been able to get it open. She’s even tried pleading, which did wonders for her dignity. Sometimes, she can feel the ship breathing around her, a distant mind buried somewhere within the mechanical hum, but it never answers her, not her words or her incessant experimentation with the assortment of levers and dials and buttons inlaid upon the white console-top. 

Being here makes her miss the Doctor’s TARDIS. It was fantastical, like something out of a fairytale. An enchanted grotto, enormous crystals shining opalescent, a dark cavern overrun by colour. This TARDIS has no custard cream dispenser. 

Yaz dragged Ethan out here to look at the TARDIS earlier in the week, since he is by far the most proficient at tinkering with alien tech. He spent an entire day under the console-room floor, working away. The engine whined and groaned in response, lights flickering and deepening, betraying a disgruntled sense of the evasive consciousness within the machine. Ethan told her that the machine is stranger and more sophisticated than anything he’d ever seen, even Cyber tech, which, according to him, is the most advanced in the universe. 

She kept some of the notes Ethan made about the structure for her, at her insistence. She stuck them on the far wall of the console room, glowing pale blue beneath the sheer paper. Yaz thinks she might start adding notes of her own, if she starts figuring out what different controls do. She has managed to identify a few familiar effects – the dematerialisation lever, for example, though the mechanism remains determinedly stuck. Most of the controls are completely unfamiliar to her, even with the very brief piloting lessons she received from the Doctor. Her desktop was entirely customised, everything jumbled into a mess of mismatched materials, different shapes and designs cluttering the same space. This ship’s layout is pristine, uninfluenced. A blank slate. Yaz has been trying, entirely fruitlessly, to make it take her back to Gallifrey.

She figures there must be some sort of return button, some way to send it back to home base. If the Doctor survived, she might still be there. She could be injured and need their help. Maybe she escaped, and left clues for them there so they would be able to find her. Maybe she’s dead. There might be a skeleton to find, amongst all the others. 

Before their encounter with the lone Cyberman, there were a great many things, alongside her mardy temperament, that had been concerning Yaz about the Doctor. An acute, righteous anger, showing itself in bared teeth, in ruthless, merciless victory. She was scattered, caught a world away – not noticing when they were watching her, and working tirelessly in a manic fever at the console, rage writ in every line of her face. Of course, it all makes perfect sense now, after seeing Gallifrey. A decimated planet, the genocide of one’s entire species… it’s more than an excuse for a bout of irritability. Yaz just wishes that the Doctor had felt comfortable enough to talk to them about it instead of lashing out. Yaz thinks that part of her probably wanted to sacrifice herself. An easy way to never have to answer any of those annoying little questions. 

Vindictive, Yaz reminds herself. Her grief, when she allows herself to feel it, is bitter. Metallic as cyber steel. 

Yaz knows she’s wasting her time. For all she knows, the Doctor put some sort of safeguard on the ship so it won’t be able to take off. That would be just like her. Yaz has to do something, she has to try. Sitting at home, running errands, contemplating returning to her job, or the search for a new one – all of that feels insurmountable compared to this task, impossible though it is. In her frustration, Yaz tugs down on the dematerialisation lever. Locked, as ever. She curses under her breath. 

Yaz spends the next couple of hours bent over the console, making notes in an exercise book. She’s cataloging all the controls, cross-referencing them with Ethan’s notes, along with her memory of the Doctor’s TARDIS. She has each panel of the console divided into distinct sections, and she’s brought in a toolbox from home. She removes the metal plating covering the wiring beneath the console one panel at a time, examining how each piece fits together. 

The person she really needs here is Ryan, who at least knows about mechanical engineering, even if he’s most familiar with the human variety. Ryan would humor her even though he thinks it’s pointless, because he’s too nice to turn her down. He would make sure to turn it into a heartfelt conversation, wherein he would be impossibly caring and sensitive, and Yaz would be brusque and dismissive, because she doesn’t want to think about what she’s feeling, what she wants is to get this  _ damn _ ship working. 

Yaz takes out her frustration on the console, but only succeeds in bruising her knuckles. 

Directionless, she dismantles the device she found on her car as well. It doesn’t get her any closer to finding out what it does, but it’s plain from the wiring and misshapen components inside that it has been assembled from a range of unrelated instruments. She has an inventor on her hands. Yaz tries to keep her heart from soaring. The Doctor would have just said hello, instead of tailing her wearing what Yaz expects is some sort of alien cloaking device. At least, Yaz hopes she would. 

It’s only ten-thirty, but more than past time to call it a day. She’s not getting anywhere like this. With a resigned sigh, Yaz pins up her pages of notes on the far wall beside Ethan’s, and leaves the TARDIS. Showing Ryan her collection of notes will show him one of two things, that she’s serious, or seriously in need of mental help. Either of the two will bring him round to helping her out.

As soon as Yaz steps out into the morning chill, she knows that someone is there. She scans the street, but sees no one besides an old man by the bins at the house across the street. Yaz’s new neighbours seem to have accepted the arrival of a completed house on an empty plot of land in broad daylight without issue. Probably one of those Time Lord tricks that Yaz tries not to think about. Smoothing things over, altering memories and perception. 

Yaz heads towards her car, blinks, and finds a gun pointed directly at her face. Instinctively, Yaz puts her hands up. The woman appeared from nowhere, though Yaz recognises aspects of her features from the shadow she has caught in her peripheral over the past couple of days. 

“Hello Yasmin,” the woman says, a wide-eyed, rapid expression on her face. Oversized, bedraggled clothing hangs from her slim frame, and black hair tangles in a greasy mess from a half-undone ponytail. She’s holding what Yaz knows from general experience to be an alien weapon; too bulky and glowy to be human. A red point of light fizzles in the barrel, a low whine emanating from it as it charges up a shot. Yaz curses herself for not trusting her instincts. She can’t help but feel a flood of excitement. Finally, something to get her blood pumping. Just like old times. 

“Alright,” Yaz flashes the woman a half-smile, keeping her tone casual and unflustered. She’s had a gun to her head more times than she can count. So far, she’s come out alive. “Who are you, what do you want?”

“I’m the one with the gun,” the woman sneers, clicking the mechanism to prove it. The whine intensifies, and Yaz sees the point of light that will surely incinerate her on impact flash brighter. “Step away from the vehicle,” she nods towards the house. 

“You mean… my house?” Yaz tries for clueless. 

“Don’t be funny, I’m not a very patient person,” she snarls, drawing her thin brows together. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Yaz sees the old man across the street look over at the scene worriedly. 

“How about you put the gun down and tell me what you want.”

“What I want is that TARDIS.”

“So shoot me and take it,” Yaz replies, nonchalant. A momentary slip in the woman’s calm fury, a hint of panic. “Ok,” Yaz reasons, speaking slowly. “Either you’ve got a conscience or you’ve got something else in mind.” 

“Where’s the Doctor?” 

Yaz tries to keep her expression unfathomable. “Who wants to know?”

“Old friend.”

“Old friend that turns up with a big alien gun? Very friendly.” The woman opens her mouth to retort, but before she can Yaz notices the man across the street fish an old flip phone out of his pocket. “Not to worry sir,” Yaz calls over with the sweetest smile she can manage. In front of her, the woman points her gun even more forcibly at Yaz, eyes blaring. “Just a joke she’s playing.” Confused, the man seems placated, and puts the phone away, beginning to shuffle back inside.

“Where is she?” the woman growls. 

“Right inside,” Yaz says amicably, trying not to let her panic show. Improvising. She’s missed the thrill of it. “I’d suggest putting the gun away,” Yaz smiles, narrowing her eyes. “She doesn’t like them.”

The woman looks askance at the street, and begrudgingly stows the gun in the pocket of her trench coat. 

“Alright, good start,” Yaz says. At her slightly patronising tone, the woman looks as if she is about to change her mind, but thinks better of it, and follows Yaz towards the TARDIS. Yaz is fairly certain that this woman isn’t a friend – death ray noted – so it’s likely that the only reason she is still alive is that the intruder thinks that the Doctor is somewhere close by. Whether she wants the Doctor’s help, wants to kill her, or just wants the TARDIS for herself, Yaz isn’t sure. She hopes she lives long enough to find out. 

“So, you’ve been following me,” Yaz states in a conversational tone. “How’d you manage the perception filter? It’s like my eyes skirted right over you.”

The woman doesn’t answer. In the corner of her eye, Yaz watches her following, one hand poised tense beside her pocket, ready to reach for her weapon. A similar tension spreads through Yaz’s spine, a chilled cocktail of fear and adrenaline. 

As Yaz and her assailant cross the TARDIS threshold, Yaz thinks she feels a current run beneath the floor. Warm and calm, like a sigh of relief. The woman pushes past Yaz, gazing around at the ship’s interior, her posture guarded. Yaz doesn’t have long, and doesn’t have many ideas. She needs to get that gun off the intruder, turn the situation around. Figure out what she wants. 

“Wait,” the woman mutters, and she places a finger to her temple, gazing around. In her moment of deliberation, Yaz seizes her chance. 

She surges forwards and grabs the woman from behind, pushing her head down towards the console with one hand, and with the other pinning her right arm to her side, preventing her from reaching the gun stowed in her coat. The woman kicks out from beneath Yaz’s grip, trying to trip her up. Yaz puts her knee into the back of her leg, knocking her off balance. She stumbles forwards, head hitting the console hard, and Yaz brings her arm swiftly across to rifle for the gun. While Yaz is bent over, the woman throws her free elbow backwards and knocks Yaz in the mouth with a painful jab. Yaz stumbles backwards, her tenuous grip on the gun ripped free. The woman spins around to face Yaz, a patch of flesh raw upon her forehead where she hit the console. 

As Yaz regains her footing, preparing to throw a punch, the woman darts forwards and grabs Yaz by the wrist mid-swing, and Yaz feels her muscles seize up, the nerves in her arm turned to stone. The sting shoots up her arm and through her chest, up her spine. She gasps, and the woman twists Yaz’s arm painfully. Yaz doubles over, facing away, and the woman kicks her in the back, knocking her to the floor. 

The groan of idling engines surges beneath the metal, and a sensation prickles at the back of her mind that might be laughter. The woman kicks Yaz in the ribs. Yaz groans, rolling over in pain, and hears a click above her. Blinking, she sees the red, sparking barrel of a gun pointed at her head. The woman’s expression is twisted in determination, her chest fluttering with curt, rapid breaths. 

“Not bad,” the woman pants, grinning. “Guess I’m a little rusty. Been out of action for a while, phew,” she whistles out a sigh. “Thanks for that.” She cracks her neck and takes a slow step closer. Yaz swings one leg out to try and strike at the woman’s feet and throw her off balance, but she dodges the clumsy blow. Yaz props herself up onto her elbows. She feels a hot slice in her lip, trailing sticky blood where the woman’s elbow smashed her lip into her teeth. “Now, time for some answers. The Doctor isn’t here at all, is she? I sensed it as soon as I passed beyond the TARDIS’ external shield. It’s a curious lie to tell,” she muses, bending down to one knee. She takes one hand off the gun and brings it out towards Yaz’s head. 

Yaz bares her teeth, breathing shallow. “What are you doing?” Now is definitely not the time to be thinking about how pretty her assailant looks with the white glow of the TARDIS shining through her dark hair. 

“Where’s the Doctor?”

“I tell you and you shoot me? Is that how this is supposed to work?” Yaz’s tone is strangled, her breathing ragged. The blow in her side kills. 

The woman groans. “I forgot how annoying you are.” Yaz isn’t sure what to make of the remark, and she’s too busy concentrating on her aching ribs to care. “The gun will kill you, that’s for sure. Contact with any of your biological matter will trigger a chain reaction and incinerate every cell in your body – but that’s a last resort. I can do worse.” Yaz realsies with a jolt that this woman is having fun. She’s enjoying every pang of Yaz’s fear, every stilted beat of her heart. As the woman’s fingertips approach Yaz’s head, she feels a spark, a static shock, emanate from them. A familiar heat she can’t trace. When the woman touches Yaz’s skin, she feels her mind wedged open. The hands that reach inside shrink back after barely an instant. Above her, the woman’s face contorts in pain, and she jerks her arm away from Yaz as if burned. 

In her attacker’s moment of vulnerability, Yaz throws her arm across her body from her uninjured side, ignoring the stab of hot pain that snags at her guts. She throws all her strength against the hand that holds the bulky alien gun, and for a moment the woman’s grip slips. The woman reaches over to steady her hold with her other hand. Taking advantage of her struggle, Yaz rolls away. Before Yaz can struggle to her feet, the woman lands a blow on the back of Yaz’s head with the bulk of her weapon. She falls back to the ground, her head slamming hard against the floor. She groans, the blue lights of the room fizzling like sparklers. 

“You are very persistent,” the woman bristles. Stars swim in Yaz’s eyes. She feels her arms pinned to her sides, one trapped beneath the woman’s knee, the other beneath her opposite foot where she is perched over Yaz’s body. The woman’s forearm is pressed into her neck, the fabric of her coat scratching against her skin. She isn’t applying any force to Yaz’s throat, not yet. In her attacker’s expression, Yaz notices a fury and desperation that wasn’t there before. She must be imagining it, but Yaz thinks she sees tears glossing her eyes. Her lips quiver as she spits out a question; “where’s the Doctor?”

“Broken record, you are,” Yaz grunts. The woman presses her arm hard against Yaz’s throat. Yaz’s energy and excitement is giving way to fear – proper, pure fear, slow and cold and encroaching. It’s not as if the Doctor is around to save her anymore. “I don’t know,” she chokes, and as the force on her neck slackens, Yaz’s breathing grows panicked, grief mingling with the fear gripping her chest. “I don’t know where she is.” She pants, voice thin and raspy. “She sent us back in this TARDIS and I haven’t seen her since and I don’t know if she’s dead or –” Yaz cuts herself off. It all came tumbling out. She feels like an idiot. 

The woman’s expression is unfathomable, and Yaz is unable to tell whether she thinks this is good news or not. “Of course,” she mutters to herself. “This isn’t her ship. I should’ve known she was too lazy to fix her chameleon circuit.” She straightens up, heel digging painfully into Yaz’s arm, the weight from her neck lifted. 

“I’ve answered your question,” Yaz pants. “Now you answer mine. Who are you?”

The woman looks at Yaz, glaring down her nose. Calculating, mingled with a healthy dose of disgust. She sighs, pressing her eyes shut, as if bracing herself. In a sudden movement, her hand darts to Yaz’s head, and presses a finger to her temple. 

Images flood kaleidoscopic through Yaz’s mind, dredged up from shallow graves. A rippling column of white light, a red glow reflected in dark eyes, a window full of stars, a conversation and a breath on the back of her neck. Yaz’s clutches at her head and rolls onto her side. No longer pinned to the ground, Yaz struggles to her feet, examining newly replaced memories. 

“You,” Yaz breathes, watching Gat where she now stands at the console, fingers skirting gracefully over the controls. She does so with a deliberation and calm that the Doctor always lacked. 

“Yes,” she mutters. 

“What are you doing here?”

She sighs. “The Doctor pulled a bit of a nasty trick,” Yaz can hear the scowl upon her lips without seeing it, twisted with venom. “Rigged my gun to backfire, blasted all my tech, teleported me down to the surface. I’ve been stuck here ever since.” 

“Are you still hunting the Doctor?” Innocuously, Yaz scans the room for Gat’s weapon. She seems to have already picked it up. For the second time in the presence of Gat, Yaz wonders why she hasn’t been killed. 

Back on the Judoon ship they had an almost pleasant conversation, or at the very least one that was enlightening, mutually beneficial. Now that Gat knows Yaz has no useful information for her, killing her would be the logical course of action, and yet she’s still alive. Not only is she alive, but her memories have been restored. She wonders if Gat is lonely. At the very least she’s out of her depth, judging by her unwashed hair, ragged clothes, and the dark circles under her once perfectly crimson-shadowed eyes. Maybe she just wants someone to mess with. Entertaining herself by inciting fear, like the Master. 

_ Like the Doctor _ , she tries not to think. 

“No,” Gat replies, fiddling with the controls with increasing erracity, “I’m re-stealing your TARDIS. More like returning it. I can’t believe she just left this here,” Gat mutters. “The most advanced vehicle in the universe left in the middle of a level five primitive planet. The thoughtless, blundering idiot.” Gat kicks the foot of the console. The ship grumbles in response. It’s more than Yaz has ever gotten out of it. 

“Of course – you’re from Gallifrey!” Yaz cries, details slotting back into place. “You can fly the ship!”

Gat scoffs. “Theoretically. I’m unfamiliar with this model, not to mention it’s damaged.” Gat sighs, running a twitching hand through her greasy hair. “Othering Omega,” she growls, and from her tone Yaz gathers that it’s some sort of curse. 

Yaz walks up to her, keeping her distance, in case Gat feels the urge to hit her again. Yaz clutches her side, and wipes her jacket sleeve across her bloodied lip. “I’ve been trying to get it working. The Doctor showed me a bit of how to fly her TARDIS, but this one’s totally different.”

Gat shakes her head, sneering to herself. “You won’t be able to fly this. You could spend your whole life shut up in this room and never figure it out.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Yaz retorts.

Gat sniggers to herself, looking as if she doesn’t believe her. “Doesn’t matter what you are, no human is ever going to get this ship to fly. It’s circuits are telepathic, you can’t work the mechanism unless you can communicate with it.”

“Is that why the dematerialisation lever is locked?”

“No,” Gat mutters, and tries the lever herself to confirm it. “Seems like the Doctor’s set the whole ship on standby to stop anyone using it. Might be her very first good idea.”

“Not for us though,” Yaz says, edging a little closer. Gat rolls her eyes, looking as if she is far from considering them a team. Yaz is determined to break the ice. If she can somehow weasel her way into Gat’s good books, she might be able to catch a ride back to Gallifrey. “So,” Yaz broaches, still keeping her distance, “where are you gonna go?”

“I’m going home, of course, to Gallifrey. Even if the Doctor’s shut down the navigation systems, it’ll be able to return.” She punctates her speech with yet more fevered button-pressing. Yaz is left to wonder if she knows what she’s doing, and more pressingly, if she should tell Gat what she has learned about Gallifrey since they last met. “Powerful Matrix signal,” Gat murmurs idly, “pulling it back home.” 

“Don’t you know?” Yaz says, sympathetic. If Gat succeeds, she will find out for herself anyway. Best to give some forewarning. 

“Know what?” 

“I’m sorry but… I’ve been to Gallifrey. It’s completely destroyed –”

“That’s not possible!” Gat snaps, turning to stare daggers at Yaz. Her reaction was far too quick to be hearing this for the first time. 

“Wait, but you’re from the Doctor’s past, right? My Doctor’s past, so it’s still there for you.” 

“It doesn’t matter.” Gat turns away. Her hands are shaking. “Gallifrey is eternal.” 

Yaz resists the urge to go and comfort her. She has reason to believe that it won’t end well. She’s sustained enough bruises for one day. “Look, I need to get to Gallifrey too. If the Doctor survived somehow, she might still be there, or there might be some clue as to where she’s gone.”

Gat doesn’t answer, and as the silence begins to stretch, Yaz sidles over to watch her work. She makes sure to head for the side where she knows Gat is keeping her gun. 

Gat watches the readout screen as it reels off row upon row of pixelated, runic text. After a moment, Gat speaks in a darkened tone without turning from the screen; “one more step and I’ll kill you.”

“You haven’t killed me yet.”

“That doesn’t mean I won’t.” 

“The Doctor isn’t around, there’s no one to hold you accountable. You could shoot me right now.” Maybe Gat isn’t the only one enjoying this a little too much. “Or,” Yaz smiles, “I could help you out. Two heads is better than one, even if one of them is a stupid little human.” Gat stifles a chuckle with a breath. So, not about to kill her. It’s a good start.

Another moment spent watching over Gat’s shoulder and Yaz breaks the silence. “Do you need anything?”

Irritated, Gat stops what she’s doing and glares over at Yaz. “I need you back off and let me work.” Obediently, Yaz takes a step backwards. “Actually, yes,” Gat mutters, eyes trained unblinking upon the screen. “There’s a black bag outside. Don’t open it, just bring it in.”

Errand girl it is. Yaz spent a lot of time fetching files and coffee orders for senior officers during her early probation days. “Not full of bombs, is it?”

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to detonate.” 

Yaz doesn’t bother to tell her she was being sarcastic. She brings in the duffel bag, which is alarmingly heavy and metal-sounding, and leaves it by the console. Gat doesn’t acknowledge her, let alone offer thanks. Yaz brings her own measly bag of tools over from the other side of the room as well, and she takes down the pages of notes she pinned to the wall, thankful that Gat hasn’t noticed them yet. Yaz doesn’t need another reason to feel like an idiot. 

Gat rifles around in her duffel bag and pulls out a plaid shirt. Unwrapping it, she fishes out a mess of tangled machinery – a black, ridged panel of plastic and metal, run through with wire and what looks like fleshy sinew. She then removes a screwdriver from her bag, its contents clanging dangerously in the interim, and tries to unscrew one of the sheets of metal plating the TARDIS console. 

“Oh,” Yaz remembers, glad to have something to contribute. She rushes to her toolbag. “I’ve got one that fits that. Had to have Ryan fetch it for me from his mechanic’s college because apparently they don’t make bolts like those anymore.” Locating the old screwdriver, she hands it to Gat, whose hand is waiting as if taking Yaz’s assistance as a given. 

“Normally you could just flick a switch. Like I said, locked down.” Gat mutters. Yaz gets the feeling that she’s more talking herself through the process, voicing frustration, than offering explanation. Gat removes the panelling, and beneath it is a pad of honeycombed flesh, pulsing veins glowing faintly yellow alongside coils of wire, threaded through and connecting to the surrounding machine. 

“What’s that?”

“Circuits,” Gat replies curtly. She examines the console innards for a moment, her face slowly settling into a scowl. “This is worse than I thought.”

“What is it?” 

Gat pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales. “Where did you find this thing?”

“Repair bay, I think.”

“Of course you did.” Gat sighs, running both hands through her dishevelled hair. “This is going to take a while.” 

“Need anything else?” Yaz asks hopefully. 

“Some space.”

Yaz makes a show of standing back, her hands raised placatingly while Gat rests the broken machinery from her bag on a flat part of the console. She begins to arrange the wiring within, threading it into what are apparently the TARDIS circuits. 

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing my communicator.” 

“Looks pretty beat up.”

“Well, I’ve got the Doctor to thank for that.” 

“Gonna be a while then?”

Gat turns to Yaz, taking her eyes off her work for the first time, only to notice that Yaz has once again crept up to stand what must be, judging by her disgruntled expression, far too close. As if forced back by her stare, Yaz retreats. After spending months on board the TARDIS with an irritable Doctor, Yaz learned the hard way when to leave someone alone. At least now she knows that the repairs will take some time, given that Gat’s first priority seems to be her communicator. Yaz just hopes that she doesn’t get it fixed and call in a whole host of Time Lords. Yaz’s priority, meanwhile, is improving team relations. Gat has to like her – or at least tolerate her – enough to bother bringing her along to Gallifrey with her. That’s the logic behind her next strategic move. That, and she’s getting peckish. 

“Don’t take off without me,” Yaz calls as she leaves the TARDIS. She makes sure to take the key with her. Gat doesn’t respond, intent upon the fried carcass of her communicator. 

Twenty minutes later Yaz returns with a cardboard tray holding two cups of coffee, and a paper bag with two sandwiches. Gat has unscrewed the panelling around the base of the console, exposing the machinery running from the desktop to the engines beneath the floor. Pale steam wafts from the mechanism in curls of grey, and thick rivulets of wire and corrugated tubing run down the central pillar. A tree truck, with roots spreading to an expansive system underground. It’s something that Yaz has always marvelled at, in the Doctor’s TARDIS as well; the blurred lines between organic and artificial. 

Gat has removed her trench coat, and it lays in a ball of brown next to her duffel bag, the metal trinkets within glittering beneath the harsh lights. Underneath, she wears a similarly oversized plaid shirt, striped with beiges and browns and muted reds. The cuffs her the sleeves are spotted with grit and splashed with dark oil. 

With the console base exposed, the sound of the engines whirrs unmuffled, seething engines venting warm air from the heat of the ship’s core. “How’s it going in there?” Yaz asks through the din.

Gat, kneeling in front of the machine, leans back and pulls herself out from under the console. 

“What did you get?” Gat asks, eyeing the bag and pair of cups that Yaz is carrying. 

“Notice I was gone, did you?”

“About five minutes ago.” Yaz can’t tell whether she’s joking or not. 

“Apparently I can’t help at all. Guess I’m sort of used to that. Thought I’d go for a coffee run.” Yaz says, setting the tray down on top of the console. 

“What’s that?” Gat asks, suspicious. She straightens up, resting her tools on the ground with a soft clang. 

“Means I got coffee.”

“What?”

“It’s just a drink,” Yaz explains, indicating the cups. “It’s still hot, so don’t go crazy.”

“What’s it for?”

“Energy rush. Keeps you awake and all that. Thought you could use it, you said this was going to take a while.” Gat scrutinises the cardboard cylinders as Yaz sets them down. 

“Got some sandwiches too,” Yaz smiles, trying to get her attention. She rattles the bag and sets it down beside the cups. “You hungry?

“I am, actually.” It looks as if it causes Gat physical pain to admit this. 

“Great,” Yaz says brightly – but not too bright, she gets the feeling that Gat has something against joy. She takes the two sandwiches out of their bag which, being from a cafe that considers itself fashionable, were horrendously overpriced. “Don’t know what you like so I just got chicken and salad stuff.” She hands one to Gat, who begins to unwrap the paper tentatively. Setting an example, Yaz starts to eat and, perhaps deciding that the offering isn’t poison, Gat follows suit. She seems to like the coffee; her black eyes go wide, almost comically large on her narrow face, dwarfed further by the mat of hair framing it. Impossibly, it seems to have grown even more unruly since Yaz left, tousled into damp curls by engine steam, slicked with dark grit and grey streaks of oil. 

“So, what have you been doing for the past month-ish, besides, you know,” pointedly, Yaz wrinkles her nose, “not showering.”

Gat doesn’t take notice, intent upon her sandwich. “I built a sensor to track surges in artron energy, picked up on a TARDIS in Hallamshire about a week ago. It took me a while to find this place – I thought I was looking for a blue box.” Definitely lonely, Yaz can see it in her eyes. It has to be a shock, stranded alone in a foreign place. 

“So you found me and started stalking?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“How’s it been though, being trapped on an alien planet?” 

“Awful,” she mutters, begrudging. 

“Yeah I’ll bet.” Yaz says. “Once the Doctor got us all stuck on this space station in the middle of nowhere. TARDIS got jettisoned as junk by the ship’s intelligence, because of course it did. We were stuck there for a week. We had each other, but still, I was dead bored.” Gat looks at her instrutably. Guarded, as if part of her wants to reciprocate the situation, but doesn’t quite know how. Her discomfort is clear; taut shoulders and tensed neck. She’s finished her coffee. “Want the rest of mine?” Yaz asks, holding her cup out to Gat. 

“Thanks,” Gat murmurs, sculling the last half of Yaz’s overpriced cappuccino. Finally, some gratitude. It’s a start. 

“How’re the repairs going?” Yaz asks. 

“TARDIS repairs aren’t my area of expertise, I’m familiarising myself with the system. I’ll have to try and hack past the defences the Doctor put in place. They aren’t exactly substantial,” she scoffs. “Entirely circumventable.”

“Well she didn’t exactly have a lot of time!” Yaz snaps, anger rising up unbidden. She was running off to her –” Yaz cuts herself off. There are some unexamined feelings hanging around, she realises. Quite a nastly lot of them. “Sorry,” she mumbles, though Gaz seems unbothered. Her brows are wrinkled in a thoughtful expression, puzzling something out. “What about that communicator thing?” Yaz prompts. 

“Got it working. Most of the wiring was already fixed up, the parts replaced, just waiting on a rail of telepathic circuitry. I hooked it up to the TARDIS,” she points vaguely toward the console where the glowing, fleshy substance sits exposed to the light. The circuit-creature breaths and quivers beneath it. 

“So?”

“Nothing. Even with the telepathic power of an entire TARDIS boosting the connection, there’s nothing to receive the signal. I’ve re-checked the temporal coordinates, they’re correct, but there’s nothing.” Gat runs a twitching hand through her hair, hiding her face. Hiding her eyes, Yaz thinks. The quivering in her fingers and silver glisten in her eyes tells her as much. Politely, Yaz pretends not to notice. “It’s like the entire Matrix network has been destroyed, and that’s not possible.” 

Silence yawns, and Yaz is unsure of what to say. She finishes off her sandwich, and Gat stares shiny-eyed into the distance. 

“Are you going to stay here tonight? Yaz asks her. 

Gat nods, eyes still far away. 

“There are probably beds on the ship somewhere, but I can’t get the door open.”

“I’m not going to sleep.”

“Look like you could use some though.”

“I won’t be staying long.” Yaz wants to ask her where she plans on going, seeing as her planet is dead, though Yaz supposes that she is doing the same thing – going home to a past full of living ghosts, the grisly future of her planet playing like a tinnitus whine through every moment, waking or not. An earworm. Time can be rewritten, surely the same is true for Gallifrey. From the sheen in Gat’s eyes, Yaz decides that now isn’t the time to ask, despite her curiosity. 

“I’ll stay if you are,” Yaz tells her. “Don’t want you doing a runner.” Gat nods, and Yaz is surprised that she doesn’t offer a hint of protest – not even a scathing glare. Progress. 

“Thank you for the food, and the coffee.” Her forced smile more closely resembles a grimace. 

“You’re welcome,” Yaz beams. Gat blinks hurriedly away, sets down her two empty cups on the console, and bends down again beneath the desktop. 

Yaz calls her Mum and says she’s staying over at a friend’s house. As a fully-certified adult, she isn’t strictly required to let her parents know where she is at all times, but they worry. Being unaccounted for is Sonya’s job. 

Back in the TARDIS, Yaz prepares to settle down on the floor and browse Twitter while Gat works on the ship. As she goes to sit, to her surprise, Gat looks over expectantly and jerks her head in a beckoning gesture. 

“Yasmin,” she says, “I thought you wanted to help.” 

“Oh, right. Yeah I’ll help.” Yaz jumps to her feet and rushes over. Gat has rolled up the sleeves of her plaid shirt over her elbows, and grey machine fluid coats her fingers in a thin veneer. The shirt, Yaz realises with a pang of unease, that she probably stole from Lee after she killed him. The uncomfortable thought clashes jarringly with the way Yaz’s heart is hammering in her chest. “And call me Yaz,” she tells her. “Everyone does.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> promise there will be more of Gat's perspective next chapter :))  
> also, I'm trying something a little different with my writing style. Less descriptors between dialogue and more single-line paragraphs for emphasis. I tend to just write in big chunks haha


	3. Solace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gat searches for answers in the TARDIS database, and is forced to face the difficult truth about the empire she has so zealously served.
> 
> Yaz brings Gat back to her supposedly-empty apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, and is forced to face two overly-concerned friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kees

**Gat**

The cannibalised Division communicator sits abandoned upon the console desktop. Humbly, it pulses, its re-engineered components wired through the fleshy telepathic interface of the TARDIS. The lone node sings its distress signal feebly through the folds and perversions of space-time, winding its way back home, but there is nothing there to receive it. 

It calls to empty air. To ash and bone. 

The TARDIS is locked into a channel of communication that, in its vast mind, is the present. She is unable to reach out to any past version of Gallifrey. Deviation from this protocol invites paradox, which Gat, with her Division-afforded privileges, might have been able to invoke if it weren’t for the restrictions that Doctor clumsily put in place before sending this ship down to Earth. 

Its channel is tuned to the apocalypse, and the apocalypse is empty. 

This is impossible, and Gat’s conviction isn’t a mere symptom of zealous pride, it is a fact. By some cataclysmic miracle, Gallifrey could burn. Hypothetically, with weapons powerful enough, a warring force with a competing hold over time could break through Gallifrey’s myriad defences, but what they could not do is wipe the Matrix – the vast reservoir of Time Lord knowledge and history – from existence. And yet, the silence on the other end of the line tells Gat that this is precisely the case. In the entire universe, not a single strand of its vast network has been left intact.

The Matrix enforces and upholds the laws of time, holding the fabric of reality together and anchoring it to a frame of order through which it can be ruled. If it were somehow degraded, let alone completely obliterated, the resulting chaos would greatly affect any Time Lord – or time-sensitive Gallifreyan, for that matter. They are raised within and reliant upon its continued existence, and its destruction would result in an utter deprivation of sense. Gat still feels time threading slow and straight and grey around her, the current of a river over a steadfast stone. If the Matrix were gone, she would be able to _feel_ it. 

Gat steps back from the console, blinking over stinging eyes strained by the bright monitor screen. The round lights on the walls have dimmed to a soft, deep blue in mimicry of a night cycle. 

There is no longer any deluding herself, what the Doctor showed Gat was not a trick, not some elaborate illusion concocted in the mind of a lunatic, but a glimpse of future reality. She saw it echoed in Yasmin’s memories when she touched her, attempting to search for the whereabouts of the Doctor. The sight of it caused Gat to flinch back, pained. It was a shock, but nowhere near as affecting as the Doctor’s deliberate communication, with its slathered layers of psychic torment. Through Yasmin’s eyes, the citadel was just a ruin. A human’s memory, capturing the universe at the surface level. 

Yasmin – Yaz, as she asked Gat to call her – is asleep, leaning in a way that can’t be comfortable against the far wall with her head propped onto her shoulder. Gat asked her multiple times, as the hours dragged on and she began to yawn, if she wanted to find a bedroom somewhere on board. It hadn’t taken long, after tinkering with the ship and establishing a baseline telepathic connection, for the ship to trust her enough to open the doors to the depths of its infinite confines. Yaz kept refusing the offer, despite the exhaustion that was plainly dragging her body down, and affecting her wit – which Gat found to be generally sharp, for a human. Yaz has a decent grasp on the ship’s mechanics, given that she was forced to learn them through trial and error, and simple observation. 

As it approached evening, Yaz made a phone call to have some more food brought over. The large, flat boxes are still lying on the floor near where Yaz now slumps, unconscious. Pizza, Yaz told her. Apparently it’s fairly popular. Gat finds it interesting, as well as pitiful, to observe how often humans require food and rest. 

As she told Yaz earlier, the lock that the Doctor has imposed on the TARDIS controls is flimsy, clumsily administered in a moment of panic. Still, it will be difficult to remove. Even then, piloting it will be another task altogether. A TARDIS of this model and make is intended to have multiple pilots, all of them far more experienced than Gat. As it stands, the task of returning this TARDIS is going to be harder than she thought. 

Her first plan had been to repair her communicator and establish a Matrix connection. Using that as an anchor, she would have been able to activate the ship’s built-in failsafe to return home. With all the TARDISes that have been stolen by renegades over the years – though there haven’t been many apart from the unfortunate, apparently-coincidental string of them among the Doctor’s immediate academy peer group – new safeguards have been employed to prevent thievery. Her plan has hit a little snag, in that the Matrix apparently no longer exists. 

Searching the entire universe in this ship’s currently anchored time-frame, Gallifrey is nowhere to be found. It’s as if it has been wiped from the face of reality, and yet – as Gat knows from Yaz’s memories, and the Doctor’s shared vision – it exists somewhere. Afire, crumbling, the citadel glass shattered and soot-stained, and the voices of the dead crying out… 

Gat has to see it for herself.

For the past few hours – and from the subtle spin of the planet beyond the shielded vessel, she puts the time at just before dawn – Gat has been programming an automated subroutine to dismantle the telepathically-administered mechanisms keeping the TARDIS locked in place. If she could just view the TARDIS’ previous coordinates, she would be able to get back to Gallifrey, but they’re obscured. It isn’t only the Doctor’s doing either, it’s as if the coordinates are masking themselves; encrypted, indecipherable. It’s as if they are incongruent with the very systems attempting to display them. She may not be an academy graduate, but she’s slogged through her fair share of temporal vehicle training as part of her Division induction. She understands the basics, and she understands more than enough to know that there is something deeply wrong with this ship. 

With the finishing touches made to her algorithm – preliminary tests conducted, edge cases run – it’s all Gat can do to wait out the potentially long process of unlocking the TARDIS’ deeper functionality. She switches the monitor to view the apparent previous coordinates of the ship, of Gallifrey. The shape of the oscillating runes and numeric symbols tug at her eyes with their blatant _wrongness_. 

From the back wall, Yaz groans, stirring in her bent position against the wall. She slides a little way down the metal surface, head lolling. 

When Gat first met Yaz, she was too embroiled in her mission to feel anything but impatience and anger. She was infuriated by the snarky, impertinent girl that seemed intent upon making her disaster of a mission even more of a slog. She was vulnerable, trapped within the stasis field, and yet she had faced Gat with her chin held high and a shard of ice in her stare. Admirable, in a pathetic sort of way. Yaz is vulnerable again now, though in a different respect. She chose to be here, to stay, despite the danger. To sleep, despite the gun still stowed away in Gat’s coat pocket. She tells herself that killing Yaz would have been a pointless venture, but when someone defies her, Gat generally doesn’t stop to consider what is pointless and what is not. 

If not pointless, then killing her is surely risky, bound to draw attention to her operations, or incite the Doctor’s anger. But the Doctor isn’t here, and Gat has no reason to leave the TARDIS and venture back out beneath the dull English sky. 

Not pointless, not risky… careless, then. Against protocol. She should wipe Yaz’s memory right now – perhaps not of all illicit knowledge, she isn’t quite so artful a telepath, but she could erase this TARDIS, erase herself. That is the way that things are done in the Division. As a non-existent member of an equally non-existent organisation, one must cover their tracks. She should do it now – and she even takes a step towards the wall where Yaz’s form is drooping ever closer to the gently vibrating metal panels beneath. It would be easy, and rational, and correct, and yet… 

Beyond pointlessness, and danger, and correctness, Gat runs out of excuses, and is forced to face the simple fact that she enjoys the girl’s company. This is why she prefers having something with which to occupy her mind. Unsavoury thoughts are bound to come slithering from beneath the works, when left the opportunity. Being stuck on Earth has been humbling, and the sensation doesn’t agree with her in the slightest. 

Undecided, she stands and simply looks. Yaz’s mouth moves in her sleep, tracing words that Gat can’t catch. The human’s brows are drawn together in distress. 

Today was the first day Gat spent with anyone in almost a month. In fact, depending on one’s definition, it was the first day she spent with someone in years. In the Division, operatives are not given the opportunity to grow attached to their colleagues – though the Doctor and _Lee_ (she always recalls his chosen name with a sneer) were an exception afforded by seniority and a loyal record. Friendships are difficult to form, when memory shifts as easily as sand beneath one's feet, tunneled through and rearranged. Their organisation is timeless, unanchored to any particular point in Gallifrey's long history, or its immortal future. As such, its agents are timeless as well, uprooted from their past, psychically shielded from the paradoxical existence that is born through a life spent correcting the universe’s mistakes. 

Friendships are difficult to form, when one’s emotions are barred behind an iron fortress, and their past is hidden. Being without such restrictions is disorientating. It reminds Gat of a youth almost entirely suppressed, apart from the surface-level facts. She doesn’t know when in Gallifrey’s timeline she comes from, the sights and smells and feelings of her childhood. All she has is a basic outline, like footnotes in a book.

The empire to which she has given so much of herself cannot be gone.

There are too many things in this room that remind her of her uncertainty. The screen, with its impossible coordinates, and Yaz, with the way that she makes Gat want to go against every rule and instinct that she clings to. Frustrated, Gat leaves the console room and enters the corridor to explore the rest of the ship. 

Every modern TARDIS model comes equipped with a limited copy of the Matrix database. She might not be able to connect to the vast network, but the cache will still be intact. Recently accessed records, instructions run, subroutines executed. For a system tasked with recalling and evaluating the past – extrapolating and optimising all possible futures – that means recent Gallifreyan history. It means answers. 

Since her arrival, Gat has built up a professional trust with the ship, a mutually-beneficial partnership. Relief sings through the walls of the TARDIS, welcoming a Gallifreyan pilot after being stranded for days on this dull planet. Beyond it runs an undercurrent, barely perceptible so as to perhaps be a mere reflection of Gat’s own tumultuous state of mind. A gentle brook coursing with grief, and pain. A warning. 

Holding her desire in her mind, Gat searches for the ship’s onboard Matrix chamber. 

The ship seems reluctant to show her, perhaps knowing what Gat wishes to search for, and grimacing in apprehension at the temporal fuss any delving into her planet’s future will doubtless kick up. Gat is overcome with a sense of reckless abandon, and the sensation is entirely new. Eventually, the ship concedes, and reveals the entrance to the chamber. 

Chamber is perhaps an overzealous description; the room is more of a large metal cubicle, tight-walled with transparent pale metal that shimmers with dull static. On the floor, the interface point shines; a lustreless white circle that begins to glow brighter at Gat’s keen presence. All the answers she needs are waiting upon the platform, to shoot up from the circuitry beneath the floor, and flood her mind with knowledge. Her idea is foolish, and reckless – pointless and dangerous and rule-breaking all in one. She wonders; do the rules still matter, when the ones who made them, and the systems that once enforced them, are dead? 

She has to know. She has to understand what happened, and find out where Gallifrey is now. Such a large data transfer is dangerous, a bitstream of raw information fed to hemispheres of higher reasoning and the visual cortex too fast to process. Pieces can leak through, splatter up the sides of the container, but Gat doesn’t have time to sort though the droves of information and consume it piecemeal. Any damage done can be rectified when she returns home, and she _will_ return home. 

Gat steps into the circle of light, and initiates the connection. White light extends upwards and fastens itself in rings of force around her body. It resonates, attuning itself to her atomic structure, and enveloping her in its mind. Gat shuts her eyes, and watches history unfold. 

The data is compressed, cached, its original resolution corrupted. What she receives is only the overview. The smooth curve of history. 

Centuries go by in political squabbles, in power changing hands, and in disputes with universal powers rising up to claim time technology of their own. All to be expected, projected. Much of the Division’s tasks pertain to stifling empires before they can blossom into competing powers, who will, in conceivable futures, come to challenge Time Lord rule and corrupt the optimal course of time. The universe, beginning to catch up. Discomforting, but not cataclysmic. Still, Gallifrey stands above the rest, eternal. 

But greater powers build, amassing upon the fringes of time. Deformed, irradiated creatures encased in metal and purged of emotion. War begins in scraps and scuffles, sparks to explosions to raging infernos, darkening the universe. Over the centuries, the impossible becomes inevitable, a bladepoint slipped in and twisted. The universe is altered beyond recognition. The web of time toiled over for so may millions of years by the hands of the Gallifreyan elite is torn asunder, fractured, minced and mulched and spat out into the cosmic gutter where it festers, stinking and rotting and spreading sickness across all reality. Trillions die, and more are never born. The chaos is nauseating, the loss incalculable. Still, Gallifrey clings, its fingertips upon the cliff’s edge. 

The Time Lords, a force that held it sacred to abstain, to observe, to manipulate from a distance, becomes a ruthless engine of war. In the name of victory, of clawing back just a fraction of their tenuous hold over time, they destroy entire galaxies, swallowing them in vast, engineered anomalies that pounce, beast-like upon the unwary, and cannibalise their existence to fuel the warfires. She feels the mind of her planet warped, in fear and hatred, from benefactors to warmongers. 

She watches people like her – the Gallifreyans born outside the Citadel’s golden engines – augmented and brainwashed and turned into soldiers, pushed to the front. She watches them fall, as fodder for the aristocracy. Time Lords are woven by the thousands, born to die, and die again and again, and as she watches – despairs, shudders within a form she can no longer sense is there – she wonders how this could possibly end aside utter oblivion. 

Sure enough, oblivion comes, but the system persists, recording a timeless void. Gallifrey has been torn from the universe, from time itself, and the noise in her head is unbearable. 

Is it noise, or just an absence of it? An absence of time, of _sense._

The machine shrivels, diminished to its basest form, and still it ticks, over and over in the nothingness. In the blackness, she can’t make out a thing, so devolved is this new system, so far removed from the one that she understands how to navigate. 

Gat’s panic is what pulls her back to reality. White rings around her in a dark room, wallscreens reflecting the void she swims within, and lights blaring red. Emergency lights. The Matrix interface is malfunctioning. Fighting back bile, Gat severs the connection. The rings of light flicker and fade, and the circle of white beneath her feet dims to a soft, grey glow in the red. She staggers, stumbling into the wall, she feels the ship beneath her, buzzing, its reflected rage vibrating through its nerves beneath the ground. Her hands find the wall; black, reflective. Gat sees the crazed eyes of a woman she doesn’t recognise – wild hair, twitching lips. There is engine grime caked beneath her nails, and flames dancing across each eye. She turns and slides onto the floor, the absence of noise pushing to be heard over the blood in her ears – no time, and the war that preceded. It’s not possible. Everything she has fought for – tooth and nail, against sore odds all her life, has been in service of that immutable future, set in twisted, gutted stone. Gat pulls her knees to her chest and buries her head, hands over her ears to claw away the not-noise, the no-time. 

In the absence, Gat isn’t sure how long it is before she hears someone calling her name. 

It’s not her real name – the one that’s far longer, incomprehensible to non-telepathic species – but the abbreviation. The callsign. And the voice is small, uncomplicated, dull – no, not dull, simple. Beautiful. There is an earnesty behind the word that she’s never heard there before, proceeding every syllable with quiet concern, soft panic. 

“Gat?” A spot of red slips into view, a face glazed in brightness with wide black eyes, a curl of cautious fingers on the doorframe. The black eyes scan the room, and fall upon her. “Gat!” Urgency, earnest urgency. When was the last time she heard something like that? 

Yasmin – Yaz, she said, to her friends – darts into the room but stops before she gets too close, holding herself back. At her side, her arm twitches, energised, hand poised to reach out. Yaz kneels down opposite Gat. Upon recognising her, Gat begins to come back to herself, chest rising and falling in short, rapid breaths, hands pulled down from her head, clamped upon her knees, knuckles nocked sharp. 

“What happened?” Yaz asks, slowly bending down to a crouch. The dim disc of white shines feebly behind her, eclipsing her silhouette. “There was this alarm going off in the console room and I saw the door was open and –” Yaz takes a deep, shuddering breath, calming herself. “Are you okay?”

Gat doesn’t answer. She attempts to still her hammering hearts, to let the no-time leak from her ears, and the ambience of grey linearity seep in. At her silence, Yaz slowly reaches her hand out. “Don’t touch me!’ Gat snaps. Arriving back in the present, she finds anger. Irritability is always close at hand, like a crutch. Yaz’s hand shrinks back. 

“Sorry,” she says. 

Gat presses her eyes shut, breathing deeply. 

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” 

Gat wants very badly to snap at her, to yell – better yet, to reach out and hurt her, zap a sliver of psychic turmoil through her tiny brain, grab the nearest gun and _shoot_. That is her instinct, but she knows what she really needs. “No,” Gat murmurs, opening her eyes again. 

Yaz lowers herself into a sitting position, patient. Spending time upon this planet, her mind has begun to tune into the unique human frequency of thought. Like electromagnetic waves, oscillating at too short a wavelength, she was blind to them, at first. Not enough cones in the cornea. Her eyes are beginning to adjust to the light. 

“Can I see it?” Gat asks, in a croaking whisper.

“See what?”

“Gallifrey, in your mind. Your memories. I need to see it. I have to know it’s real.” It’s one impossibility after the next; Gallifrey burning, Gallifrey non-existent, Gallifrey snatched from the jaws of war and marooned out of time, slowly fading.

“Are you sure?” 

Minutely, Gat nods, and shifts her weight, moving her legs down to the side of her body, slumping forwards from the wall. Yaz reaches out, and her hand hangs in midair, unsure. She winces, a tremor twitching at her features. Her other hand clenches into a fist, but she pushes on. Gat struggles to regain herself, to reign in the telepathic force that she knows is radiating from her in tidal wavefronts, submerging Yaz’s mind. 

She’s never lost control like this before, such carelessness is unthinkable, a thing of taboo, of the highest disrespect. She mumbles out an apology. “I’m sorry, I can’t – I’m trying.” She feels wedged open, reached inside and unhinged. The air rushes in, and the pain rushes out of a mind fastened tight as a sprung steel trap for decades of unrepentant service. It’s like trying to gather sand in her arms. Inevitably, it spills, and it cuts across the plains blade sharp on the wind, the storm. There’s a hand on her shoulder. 

“It’s okay,” Yaz says, and Gat can see her whole body quivering. It’s dangerous, she shouldn’t be so close. 

This is a side effect of her inferiority, the remnants of the abilities of natural-born Gallifreyans, curbed by generations of genetic engineering, of composure and discipline and suppression, but never quite stamped out. Abilities natural and volatile, untameable. Shameful. She can feel the outer-city grit beneath her nails, and feel the shadow of the citadel upon her back. It mutes the suns. 

“It’s okay,” Yaz repeats. 

Gat should never have tried to take on so much at once, her mind wasn’t made for it, because it wasn’t made at all. There is no intention in her being. No purpose. No artistry – and when she dies (she feels like it might be happening now) there will be no light waiting. No golden laced through the marrow of her bones, weaving every cell. 

Reaching up, Gat grips Yaz’s arm where it is stretched out, one hand grasping her shoulder. It pulls her down, like an anchor. The muscles beneath the human’s jacket quiver. Gat reaches out with her other hand and places it on the side of Yaz’s head. The connection is sloppy, lazy, careless, palm splayed without the focus of a fingertip, spread, forceful. Reaching in, she is met with resistance, like an open palm on the surface of a lake. Marmalade over her brain, orange as flame, and pain, surging through. Gat can feel it in the exchange, but Yaz holds on. 

Gat catches a glimpse of it; Gallifrey, cracked-eggshell citadel and charred towers crumbling to ash upon the air. White as snow over the mountains, the ice that frosted the prairies in pink foam, but the ground is hard-packed, an orange cragg. The suns blare angry and hot behind a silver haze of gas. Red leather on her skin, the stench of old death in her nose – it is so very bland, flat as a postcard. A two-dimensional image. She gazes upon the scene without the outcry of psychic vestiges, screaming, clawing, warning; _stay away_. There is a monster here, and the air tastes like mercury. 

She feels herself becoming lost, and the mind encasing her beginning to heat like an overworked machine. Gat brushes off memories that surge beyond the scene she came for; a happy childhood, a lonely adolescence. A brush of something else; recent and bitter. Rich, pungent, forefront. Grief and anger and uncertainty. Love, tangled through with resentment. Yaz is barely holding herself together, Gat realises, clutching crumbling pieces just as tightly and fruitlessly as Gat clings to her armful of ever-falling sand. What does the human expect to find on Gallifrey except a ruin – and what does _she_ expect to find? 

Beyond her intrusion, shame brews. This is worse than impertinent, it’s a violation, an abomination – but it’s there, the truth. Gallifrey still exists. Afire, but real. Somewhere. She looks back; walking with purposeful strides into a wall of spitting violet energy, she recognises the snap it leaves in her hair, the mottled spots it leaves in her unseeing, human eyes. The brush of the schism, the fabric of reality fractured, torn, its blackened innards directed. Between is oblivion. The light marks a passage between universes. 

Gallifrey is outside of this universe. 

During the exchange, she must have pulled herself closer, strengthening the connection in the only way she could muster, foreheads pressed close. When she opens her eyes, recognises their proximity, Gat jerks backward, and her back slams against the wall. Yaz’s eyes burst open, wide and panicked. She is still holding Gat’s shoulder. 

“Of course,” Gat murmurs.

“What, what is it?” Yaz still clings to her, but Gat shakes off her grip. A look of disappointment flashes across Yaz’s face. She winces, and her hand goes to her head, quelling a burgeoning ache. No wonder, given what Gat did to her. 

“I just need to widen the search parameters, turn off the safeguards, the navigation shields,” Gat mutters low, under her breath. Her hands twitch where they hover above her knees, drawn once more to her chest. “I can get back, it’s still out there.” Shakily, Gat gets to her feet, the dark wall at her back steadying her as she stands. On the floor, Yaz’s head lolls, and Gat sees her mouth form the sound of her name once more. Gat darts back down to her side before Yaz collapses completely. Her forehead is afire; heat quickening with every pulse of her heart. It was a foolish thing to do (pointless, dangerous, _wrong)._ Worse, Gat thinks, for the first time in a long while, it was unkind. Generally, this isn’t something she concerns herself with. She sets Yaz gently down upon the floor and returns to the console room. 

Around her, the TARDIS protests – not just because of the colossal breach of Matrix etiquette (and isn’t that ironic, given what got her into this situation in the first place) but also, she suspects, because Gat left a human its sanctums. She feels that it’s a testament to their growing understanding of one another that the ship allowed Yaz passage into the deeper regions of the ship to pull Gat out of her little breakdown. 

Back in the console room, the controls beckon – something to take her mind off the tirade of images still circling every passing thought, predatory, encroaching. Gat does her best to keep them at bay. It might take her hours to properly disable the ship’s safeguards, allowing it to return to the place where Gallifrey now resides, beyond the universe it shaped as its dominion. As of now, she feels far too rattled to concentrate. That, and there is yet another fresh sensation is tugging at her. Remorse. She feels like she should probably apologise to Yaz. 

Gat puts the leftover pizza into one box, picks up her trench coat, and brings both items back toward the Matrix chamber. She checks Yaz’s temperature and finds that it is beginning to return to normal, careful to hastily construct a wall around her mind when she touches her skin. So close to the brain, there is a danger of memories leaking across the unravelling thoroughfare. Gat slides the folded coat beneath her head, because one side of Yaz’s face is cold and lightly bruised against the metal beneath. She sits down at the other side of the small room and eats some of the cold pizza. Chewing through the tough base, the chilled, congealing tomato paste, she trawls through the history she just witnessed, examining its broad strokes more closely. 

She remembers what the Doctor told her – the small, blonde one with the wicked smile. Gallifrey was destroyed twice in her time; once by a war, once by a lunatic. She’s seen one ending, but the other has been hidden, unnavigable through this ship’s measly nodic imitation of the Matrix. The connection isn’t powerful or nuanced enough to trawl through data captured in a timeless state, beyond the laws of sense and physics. Besides, whatever existence persisting in that hollow, sequestered place must be so strange, so unimaginable… unbearable, even. To be without time. It sickens her just to consider it. 

“Gat?” Yaz’s voice sounds from her place huddled upon the floor. She blinks, raising her head from her brown makeshift pillow. Yaz wrinkles her nose in disgust, breathing in the stench of mothballs and sweat and city grime. 

Gat hums an acknowledgement, crawling out from under the sights that loom; of fire and grief and all-consuming nonsense. 

“What happened?” Yaz sits up, suddenly alert. Attention runs through her every muscle like lightning snap, so hot, and quick. She reminds Gat of her fellow agents, of herself. 

“I’m sorry about that,” Gat says, and she really means it. “I just wanted to know. I needed to see what you saw. The connection was unstable, I was… careless.” 

“Are all Gallifreyans telepathic?” Past pleasantries and straight to questions. Yaz doesn’t even seem to care what Gat just did, taking pain and confusion in her stride. 

“Most of them. It varies.” Gat really doesn’t feel like getting into it now, despite the palpability of Yaz’s curiosity. It follows her like a cloud. 

Yaz eyes the white disc in the centre of the room, the raised dias around it, and the silver light inlaid in circular patterns around the ledge. “This looks like the place where we found the Doctor. The inscriptions on the light” – she edges over, only having to push herself slightly along the ground, shifting her weight, to closely examine the markings. Cyclic Gallifreyan runes are superimposed upon the opaque surface. “They’re the same. She said something about a, err.” She presses her eyes shut in concentration. “A Matrix chamber.”

“Yes,” Gat explains. “It’s an interface point.”

“You said that the Matrix network was destroyed.”

“Appeared to be destroyed. It can’t be destroyed, that’s the point. But it makes sense now. I couldn’t connect with my communicator because Gallifrey no longer exists in this universe.” A shiver runs through her when she says the phrase aloud.

“So, it’s like a computer?”

“The Matrix is a database – but it’s more than that. The minds of the dead, a shared consciousness. It holds all of Time Lord knowledge and history. Its entire timeline.”

“So, did you go looking for the future? For the way it ended?”

Gat pauses, swallowing thickly. “What makes you ask that?”

“Because that’s what I would look for, if someone told me that the Earth was destroyed. I’d want to know how it happened. That and you seemed… distraught.” It's an understatement, a courteous understatement. Gat is beyond embarrassed, though she really shouldn't care what some human thinks of her. Yaz clambers to her feet, and though she puts a hand instinctively to her brow, where heat no doubt still spreads feverish beneath her skin, she quickly steadies herself. “So, it’s like the internet or something.” Gat scoffs, and Yaz glowers at her. “In a nutshell, I mean.”

“In a what?” 

“What did you see?” Yaz asks, ignoring Gat’s confusion. She is staring at the white light almost hungrily, her eyes a gilded silver. 

“Did the Doctor ever tell you about her past on Gallifrey?” Any mention of the war, of why and how Gallifrey came to be outside of time. How it came to burn again, after all hope was already lost. 

Yaz laughs. “No way, mate. Not a thing. It was sort of a point of contention. And anyway I asked my question first.” She looks over at Gat sympathetically, and for the first time Gat doesn’t find the sensation entirely repugnant. 

“I saw… a war that spanned centuries. A war that nearly destroyed the entire universe, and its adjacent realities. All universes, all life. It destroyed Gallifrey too, except that it didn’t, somehow. It’s like there are two versions of events, overlaid, oscillating imperceptibly between two states.”

“That’s,” Yaz pauses, but seems unable to find the right word. “That’s awful.” Beneath her condolences, curiosity lurks. Yaz passes an open palm over the cylindrical space above the white circle, as if hoping to catch a remnant of what Gat saw for herself. 

“And that was just the crossfire – _our_ crossfire.” Gat shuts her eyes, and sees flames. “And to see the entire universe brought down in the name of the Time Lords… But we had – _will_ have – no other choice, I know that. Who else will protect the universe from malicious forces trying to take control for themselves, if not us. But to see what all our work is heading for, what I’m heading for…”

“Still think it’s a perfect system?” Yaz asks. Gat doesn’t answer because, in her separation from it, she has been forced to observe its workings from the outside. A system that devolves into one so intent upon its continued rule that it would tear the universe apart to keep the privilege. A system where failure is not an option. 

“Look,” Yaz says, still sympathetic. She goes over to Gat and sits down beside her, and Gat tries to stop her shoulders from tensing up. Yaz sighs and leans her head back against the wall. “A couple of years back, I would have been the first one to defend the Police Force. Earth law enforcers, that is. I thought, sure, there are some bad ones, but the vision is noble. The cause is worth fighting for, because you’re helping people, right? You’re keeping them safe. But the whole thing’s corrupt, and nothing one well-meaning person can do will change that.”

Gat grits her teeth, and clenches her jaw. She wants to bite back, tell Yaz that the two scenarios are not remotely comparable. A petty security force on a primitive planet and an elite agency that enforces the laws of time itself. Their disenchantment is not the same. But, she is forced to recognise, the basic beats of the story are there. Like Yaz said, in a nutshell. 

“Sorry,” Yaz grins. “Projecting, right? I’m just dealing with some stuff. Not sure I want to go back to work or not.” 

“Yeah,” Gat murmurs. “Me too.”

“Fancy a sabbatical then?” Yaz smiles. She reaches across and takes one of Gat’s fidgeting hands in her own. Her touch is warm, and calming, and dripping with emotion. Gat yanks her hand away. 

“Sorry,” Yaz mutters, dejected. 

Gat’s expression sours, and determinedly, she gets to her feet. “I’ve got work to do.” 

Yaz waits a few respectful moments before following her. 

In the console room, Gat sets about updating the parameters of her search, looking for the dead-time Matrix signal that pulses feebly from somewhere beyond her current plane of existence. She switches off the safeguards, lowers the navigation shields, and suffers through the ship’s complaints all the way. Yaz stands back, but Gat can feel her eyes upon her. 

When Gat steps back from the console, taking a deep breath and tearing her eyes away from the monitor, Yaz interjects with a question Gat can feel practically buzzing through the air in its anticipation to escape. 

“On that Matrix thing, could we look up the Doctor?”

Gat sighs pointedly. “And why would you want to do that?”

“To figure out where she is now,” she says, as if it were obvious. 

“It’s just a cache, a copy of recently accessed data. Recently examined history. You won’t find anything about the Doctor on there.” Gat disengages the shielding. The TARDIS sighs as the lights dim to a quiet, warning red. “And don’t lie.”

“What?”

“You lied, just now. That’s not the reason.” Gat says, nonchalant. Although she keeps her eyes on the controls, she can sense Yaz seize up behind her, caught off guard. Gat imagines wide, black eyes, mouth agape, mouthing words not yet decided upon. Mind working quick – for a human, anyway. Searching for excuses. “I saw the way you were looking at the Matrix interface,” Gat says, folding her arms and turning to face Yaz. And there it is, just as she pictured it. She’s quite pretty when she’s flustered. Almost pretty as she is when she thinks she’s about to die. 

“Well, it’s like I said.” Yaz quickly smooths over her desperation with an easy calm. “The Doctor never told us anything about herself, except the names, you know. Time Lord, Gallifrey, Kasterborus.” She ticks them off boredly on her fingers. “She said she was old, she could change her face. That’s all we – that’s all _I_ know.” But a slade of something else slips in, chasmic. Maybe it’s the lingering connection between their minds, or maybe it’s just that Yaz makes a habit of blatantly advertising her feelings, because there it is, behind her grief. Gat knows that look; adoration and selfless, devoted loyalty. She saw it on Lee’s face often enough. 

“Great,” Gat scoffs, unfolding her arms and turning back to the console. “You’re in love with her aren’t you?” 

“What? No!” Her answer is far too quick. Brusque and angry and often-rehearsed.

“Don’t worry, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last, not that I’ll ever understand it.”

“I’m not in love with her – I mean I _wasn’t_ –” Yaz trails off, sulky. She inhales, exhales, collects herself. “I miss her, that’s all. I need to find her.” 

“But in the meantime, you’ll find out what you can, because you’re not worried that the Doctor is dead.”

“Of course I am!”

“You’re not, because you believe in her. Unfortunately, I do too, because I’ve seen her escape a firing squad with nothing but a safety pin and an old recorder." Gat looks at Yaz, head downturned, acerbic. "You’re worried that she’s taken off and got herself some new humans to amuse her.”

“She wouldn’t,” Yaz says, her expression darkening, frown deepening. It’s clear that she doesn’t believe herself. 

“I’ve seen it, Yaz," she shrugs with a blasé grin. "Human brains, they don’t seem to be able to untangle emotion from perception, from recollection. Emotion taints objectivity, twists it, in an unaugmented organic nervous system. Your memories of Gallifrey were tangled up in steeped layers of grief and frustration and,” she tries to find the right word, and settles with a sneer upon, “ _yearning_.”

Yaz’s expression twists, and she looks away. “It’s just, I’ve seen her do things, say things. You know, cruel stuff. Makes me question who I was following. Whether I’m her friend or just… I don’t know.”

“A pet?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“No, but you were thinking it.” Gat steps away, fiddling with the controls, setting a search in motion that will trawl through all conceivable realities, and the nothingness in between, to locate Gallifrey. “It would certainly seem that way, to an outsider,” she continues idly. “When the Time Lords caught up to her – him, at the time – there were humans with him, two of them plucked from different points in Earth’s history. Of course, they were returned to their proper time, their memories wiped of all anachronistic details.”

“Like you were going to do to me,” Yaz says vindictively. 

“Yes. Point is, this pattern has been going on for a while, this infatuation with the Earth and its inhabitants.” She wrinkles her features in thought, looking Yaz up and down. “You must seem so small, to someone like her.”

“And to you?” Yaz’s eyes are wide and hopeful and hurt. This is of no concern to Gat, or at least, it shouldn’t be. The truth is that given time to think – unmonitored, unwatched and uninhibited – she is starting to believe the opposite. Something about the human atmosphere, with all its silence, is large to the point of oppressiveness. In her proximity to Yaz, in the lingering, closing connection between them, the texture only deepens to a richer, more varied timbre. Thoughts hum, quiet and comforting, at a new frequency. 

Gat does not answer her. Instead, she folds the fabric of Lee’s shirt between her fingers, and studies the streaks of oil and bolognese that fester upon the tartan fabric. 

“I’m going to wash,” she says. 

“Great, yeah,” Yaz replies in a casual manner that fails to hide her bitterness. “Been meaning to nag you about that.” 

Gat runs into a slight problem. The ship has sealed itself off again. Gat hammers at the door controls with increasing intensity, and she hears Yaz moving about behind her, coming to investigate. 

“You good?” she asks. 

Gat puts a hand up to the metal surface of the door, extending the most polite request she can manage, all the telepathic pleasantries she can think of, and more than a ship of this make deserves. Gat makes sure to apologise for barrelling like an anachronistic wrecking ball through its Matrix data cache, for setting off all those alarms, letting a base-level sentient creature crawl around its insides, and for taking all the ship’s defences offline. Understandably, their professional partnership has come under strain. 

“What are you doing?” Yaz asks, arms folded as she watches Gat try to reason with the sheet of stubborn metal. 

Gat sighs, turning to glare at her. “Apologising.” 

A look of surprise flickers across Yaz’s face, and small smile curls the edge of her mouth. “About time.”

“Not to you, to the ship.”

“Oh,” she looks away with a roll of her eyes. “Right. It won’t let you in then?” 

“It distrusts me.”

“Because you busted up its Matrix thingy?”

Gat sighs, removing her hand from the door. “It was… unorthodox.”

“Illegal?”

“Quiet.”

Yaz scowls and looks up at the door. She sighs, unfolding her arms and resting her hands on her hips. “You know, once Ryan spilt a can of 7 Up on the TARDIS controls and then it deleted his bedroom. He had to kip on the library sofa for a week.” 

“I should get back to work,” Gat mutters, moving past Yaz towards the console. 

“Look,” Yaz reasons, following her. “Why don’t you come to mine? You can shower, get some fresh clothes. Who knows how long this is all going to take.” 

She’s right, Gat has no idea how long the search will take to complete. She is navigating uncharted waters – frankly illegal, incongruent, terrifying waters concerning the absence of time and the aftermath of a terrible, celestial war. Not only that, but the ship is in a huff, and Gat stinks of fuel and singed circuitry and Lee Clayton’s unaired wardrobe. 

So, strangely enough, Gat agrees to Yaz’s proposition, if only to block out the sounds of the screams and temporal weapons blasts still rocketing around inside her head. 

**Yaz**

“Do you know how to drive?” Yaz asks Gat as they walk towards her second-hand Nissan. It’s TARDIS blue, because at the time she thought it would be a nice gesture. Now the colour stings her eyes. 

“I once hijacked a Sycorax mothership with my hands cuffed behind my back and Astrophian poison about halfway through shutting down my vascular system.” 

“Okay, but can you drive a car?” 

Gat sighs. “Probably best if you do it.” 

Yaz smiles, wide and smug, and the look of frustration of Gat’s face only makes her smile wider. She looks as if she wants to punch Yaz’s teeth in. 

On the short drive over to the Park Hill estate, Yaz switches on the radio. She has a strange desire to find something good to listen to, and give Gat a good introduction to Earth music. She has a feeling that whatever she put on, Gat would still be sitting in the passenger seat wearing the same petulant scowl. Her arms are folded over her filthy shirt, and Yaz winds the driver’s window down an inch to disperse the smell of burning. The Sheffield morning passes outside the windows. A grey Saturday morning just before ten, and the streets are nearly empty. Yaz’s parents are out in the city meeting up with some family friends, and Sonya has a shift at Sainsbury's. It’s her sixth job in the last two years. 

“You want me to apologise, don’t you?” Gat mutters. In her peripheral, Yaz sees her glance back from the view of cinder block apartment buildings and the odd sad tree. 

“That’s a funny way to say you’re sorry.”

She sighs. “Well I am.”

“Are what?” She feels Gat scowl, and thinks the conversation might be over. 

“Sorry.” Gat sounds like she’s gritting her teeth. “I don’t think you’re small.”

Incredibly, Yaz doesn’t think she’s lying. 

They take the stairs up to Yaz’s flat. Thankfully no one’s plans have changed, and the house is empty. Gat hesitates at the threshold for a moment as Yaz pockets her keys and takes off her trainers, looking around at the cramped interior. Dining room and kitchen and living room all crammed into one; light wood that catches golden in the dim sun, white kitchen countertops, and a grey sofa in front of a flatscreen TV left on standby. 

“Take your boots off,” Yaz instructs. 

Gat obeys, eyeing the overflowing shoe rack by the door with curiosity. “Who else lives here?” she asks. 

“Mum and Dad and my sister,” Yaz explains. “Don’t worry, they’re not due back until this afternoon.” She heads for the kitchen and puts the kettle on to boil. Gat shuffles into view a few moments later, looking uncomfortable. She examines the framed photographs on the TV cabinet. 

“Want coffee?” Yaz asks her.

“Yes, thanks.” Yaz takes out two mugs and fishes a tin of instant coffee out of the cabinet. She has a feeling that Gat likes it for the adrenaline kick, and not the quality of taste. 

“I’ll show you where the bathroom is.” Yaz sidles up behind Gat, who is holding up a photo of Yaz and her family from about twelve years prior at Chessington World of Adventures. She remembers going on a school day when the park was nearly empty. Little Yaz grins at the camera with manic excitement from under a sparkly pink baseball cap, her skinny limbs knotted with energy. Sonya holds her hand, a sulky look on her face. “Oh yeah,” Yaz smiles fondly. “That was a good day.” Gat’s eyebrows are drawn up in what might be intrigue, or regret. 

“Miss your family?” Yaz asks sympathetically. 

Gat puts the picture down beside the others; Yaz and Sonya through the years, an array of elaborate dark braids taking them through every year at Redlands Primary and beyond. There’s a picture of Yaz on Graduation day, wearing a long red dress and beaming at the camera. Gat’s voice is brunt. “No.” 

Yaz thinks she’s probably lying. “Come on.” Yaz almost takes her hand, but decides against it. “Bathroom’s this way.” 

Yaz gets a towel out of the cupboard for Gat, and fishes an outfit from her room; blue jeans and a black T-shirt, along with a sports bra and underwear. Can’t go wrong with plain and practical, though judging by Gat’s work uniform with all its studded shoulder pads and gold lining, it isn’t a Gallifreyan staple. She sets the towel and clothes aside for Gat on the floor outside the shower. The apartment isn’t big enough for a tub, and the single bathroom is the cause of at least sixty-percent of tension in the family unit. 

“Shampoo and conditioner’s in there,” she tells Gat, who stands awkwardly upon the cold tiles. “Know how to use it?”

“Yes, Yaz, I can use a shower,” Gat grumbles. 

“Okay, well I don’t know. Maybe they don’t do showers on Gallifrey.” At the sound of the word, Gat’s forehead wrinkles. Noted. Maybe Yaz should stay away from the name. It’s like being with the Doctor all over again. There are certain words that you just don’t say. 

As Yaz spoons instant coffee into two mugs of boiling water, heaping a generous lump into Gat’s brew, she hears a rattle of keys outside the front door, and freezes. It’s barely past ten, there shouldn’t be anyone here. The door opens, and there’s a thud on the carpet as a handbag is tossed haphazardly to the floor. There’s only one person in the house with such a blatant disregard for the safety of their belongings. Sonya. 

Yaz steps out of the kitchen and rounds on the entrance, hands on her hips. Sure enough, Sonya is shaking off her too-high wedged heels, using one hand while the other manages to scroll on her phone with surprising dexterity. 

Yaz clears her throat. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Hi stupid,” Sonya mutters. “I live here.”

“You’ve got work today.”

“I did,” she shrugs, her shoe coming free with one final shake. It skitters across the carpet a few metres past the shoe rack. She doesn’t bother picking it up. “Don’t anymore.”

“Did you get fired again?”

“No, someone’s covering. I’ve got an important event.”

Yaz rolls her eyes. “Sure you do.” 

“So,” Sonya fishes her handbag off the ground and walks towards Yaz. “Where were you last night?”

“At a friend’s.”

“You don’t have friends.”

“I do,” Yaz says indignantly. 

“Ryan and his Grandad don’t count.” 

There’s movement from the far end of the front room. Gat stands in the entrance to the hallway wearing Yaz’s clothes, her long hair wet and dripping onto a towel that she’s wrapped around her shoulders like a teal cloth cape. 

“Oh,” Sonya looks at Gat, then back at Yaz, animated realisation dawning upon her face. “Oh, so you’re –” a wicked grin spreads across her heavily made-up face, Friday night’s mascara smudged under her eyes. “Yasmin!” she exclaims, rounding on Yaz with her eyebrows raised. “Got something you’d like to share with the class?” Yaz’s gaze flicks over to Gat in panic, who raises an eyebrow in amusement. 

“I – what?” Yaz mutters, looking back at Sonya. 

“You were with her, weren’t you? Last night.” She turns, surveying Gat. “Wait, were you just in your bedroom” – and she looks back at Yaz with mutinous disgust – “I want that bedroom!” 

“Oh my god,” Sonya chuckles, “she’s wearing your clothes.” Before Yaz can defend herself, Sonya is heading towards Gat, whose wide eyes suggest she is trying to decide whether to run or to knock Yaz’s sister unconscious.

“Sonya,” she says, giving Gat a lazy wave.

“Gat,” Gat replies curtly, looking bewildered. 

“That short for something?”

“Uhh... Gatricia,” Yaz says, sounding unsure. 

“Is it actually though?”

“No,” says Gat.

“Yes,” says Yaz.

Sonya glances between the two of them for a moment, then rolls her eyes. “Okay then.” She pulls her phone out of her handbag as she heads towards the hall. Gat steps aside as she approaches, but Sonya stops in front of her and looks up at her, scrutinising. “You’re too good for her,” Sonya says matter-of-factly, nodding back toward Yaz. “Get away while you can.” Yaz hears Sonya muttering under her breath as she pads down the hall. “Always attracts the weirdos.” 

“So,” Yaz chirps, plastering on a grin. “Still want that coffee.”

“I thought you said the house was empty.”

“Well it was empty, only now it isn’t because my sister can’t keep down a job for more than a few months!” she raises her voice as she says this, and in response Sonya retorts a muffled ‘screw you’ through the thin walls. 

“You don’t seem to get along,” Gat remarks, moving into the kitchen. Yaz fetches milk for the coffee, along with a packet of biscuits from the cabinet. 

“Just sibling stuff. We argue but, honestly she’s probably my best friend. Don’t tell her I said that though.”

Gat’s smile is slight and sad. “I won’t.” 

“Biscuit?” Yaz rattles the packet in offerance. They’re Hobnobs, not Custard Creams. There was never any point keeping her own stock when she could get them dispensed for free on the TARDIS whenever the craving arised. 

“Thanks.” 

A moment later they sit opposite one another at the small dining table, the blinds drawn open to welcome the weak sunlight of the burgeoning morning outside. The open packet of Hobnobs sits between them, and Gat has slung her towel over the back of her chair. 

“Sorry about Sonya, by the way, her mind’s in the gutter. Probably because she spends most of her time there.”

Gat shrugs at her. “I have,” she exhales, “no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”

“Right, colloquialisms,” Yaz reminds herself. “Nevermind.” 

“How long have you lived here?” 

“Since I was really little. We moved here before Sonya was born so I don’t remember where we lived before. An even smaller apartment, if you can believe.” 

“It’s nice,” Gat remarks, looking out at the view they have out to the hazy Sheffield skyline. 

“What about you – if, you know, you don’t mind me asking. What was your home like, when you were a kid?” 

Gat smiles ruefully and takes a gulp of her coffee before continuing. It’s too hot, because Gat’s trying hers black, and Yaz’s white brew is barely cool enough to sip. It’s the little things that remind you someone’s an alien. The Doctor used to eat stuff straight out of the oven, and fall asleep standing up. “I don’t remember most of it,” Gat admits. 

“That long ago, was it – wait,” it’s the first time that the thought has occurred to Yaz, mostly because it’s an impolite sort of question.She didn’t ask how old the Doctor was for months after they met, and didn’t get anything beyond a diverting anecdote for years after that. “How old are you?”

“Seventy-three,” Gat says, her lips wrinkling from the bitterness of her coffee. 

“Get out,” Yaz cries. She grins. “That’s so weird.” 

“And you’re?” Gat prompts. 

“Hang on,” Yaz grins, lending forwards over the dining table, “guess.”

“What, why?”

“Go on.” Yaz takes a surreptitious sip of coffee. 

“Err,” Gat narrows her eyes, searching Yaz’s face. “Forty?”

_“Forty!”_

“Well I don’t know,” Gat cries defensively. “I don’t know how long humans are supposed to live.”

“I’m twenty-one.” Gat almost spits out her drink. “Yeah,” Yaz reiterates, eyebrows raised. “So don’t go cradle snatching.” Gat looks confused. Sometimes she should really keep her mouth shut. 

“What?”

“Well, you know, Sonya thinks we’re an item.”

“A what?”

“You know,” Yaz takes a biscuit as an excuse to divert her eyes. “Like a couple, which is stupid, obviously.” She trails off, and to her horror, when she looks up again Gat is staring directly at her. 

When there’s a knock at the door, Yaz is almost relieved. Except then she remembers that it might be her parents, and she’s bowled over by yet another wave of nervous dread. 

“Someone else coming into this empty house of yours?” Gat asks wryly. 

“Can’t be,” Yaz mutters, standing up and glaring over at the front door. “Dad never misses brunch.” They knock again, meaning they don’t have a key. “Coming!” Yaz calls, as she hurries over to the door. 

She pulls the door open to see Graham O’Brien’s outstretched fist hovering mid-knock. Ryan and Graham look at her and, in hivemind-like unison, smile broadly. Ryans arms are laden with tupperware, the still-hot pastries inside fogging up the plastic. 

“Morning Yaz,” Graham says warmly. “Ryan and I did some baking the other day.”

“Apparently Raavio’s celiac so, didn’t go down too well.” Ryan shrugs. “Guess they don’t have gluten in the Cyber-war.” 

Yaz stays silent for what must be a little too long, because their smiles falter, and Ryan cranes his neck to look into the apartment. 

“Right,” Yaz says, putting on her brightest tone. “It’s just… it’s not a great time, that’s all.”

The boys exchange a knowing look. Ironic, seeing as they have no idea what’s going on. Yaz would prefer to keep it that way. 

“Yaz,” Ryan says gently, and from his expression she knows she’s about to get well-meaning a lecture. “Were you heading back out to the TARDIS?”

“No,” she says, and though it’s sort of true, it also sort of isn’t. 

Ryan latches onto the latter interpretation, and sighs. “Why don’t you let us come in, catch up. We’ve got loads to tell you.”

“That we do, son,” Graham agrees, clapping Ryan on the back. 

Yaz can’t see a way out of this that doesn’t involve slamming the door in their faces. They’re too persistent, too kind. It’s annoying. “Yeah,” she nods, already regretting it. “Sure, come in.” She’s wondering if she should run ahead and tell Gat to hide in a closet or something. 

“Oh, hello there,” Graham calls, spotting Gat at the other side of the room. Too late. Curse open-plan living. 

“Hello,” Gat replies. She glances over at Yaz with a smug expression on her face. She is deriving far too much enjoyment from Yaz’s distress, though that’s not a novel observation, given how they met, and the proceeding bruises. 

“Would you like some tea?” Yaz asks them, and uses their agreement as an excuse to dart to the other side of the room toward the kitchen. “Look,” she says to Gat in an urgent, hushed tone. “Can you act like a regular human for, like, half an hour tops.” 

“I don’t know, can I?”

“Shut up,” she hisses. “They absolutely can’t know we’re repairing the TARDIS.”

“Why not?”

“Morning,” Ryan’s voice sounds from behind her. Yaz straightens up and turns back to the kitchen counter in a way she hopes is inconspicuous. “I’m Ryan,” he holds out a hand, which Gat shakes tentatively, wincing slightly as their skin touches. If Ryan notices, he’s too polite to say anything. He’s too polite full stop, in Yaz’s opinion. “Sorry, I didn’t know Yaz had someone round.”

“Gat,” Gat replies with an easy smile. A decent meal and a shower seem to have done her wonders. There’s no crazed glint in her eye, and her hands are still where they rest upon the tabletop, free of their usual feverish twitch. “Not short for Gatricia, just by the way.” She casts Yaz a sidewards glance. 

“Brought some baking, but fair warning, I’m no expert.” Ryan sets the tupperware on the table while Graham comes and introduces himself to Gat as well. 

“So, you’re a friend of Yaz’s then,” Graham prompts, sitting down at the small table. By the kitchen counter, Yaz tenses up, watching the water level in the kettle begin to bubble and simmer. She wonders what Ryan and Graham will do once they find out what she’s planning. Will they try and stop her, or want to come with her? Neither of them seem to believe that the Doctor could have survived, but she can’t imagine them letting her visit a fiery, cyberman-infested ruin by herself. Yaz braces herself. 

“Yeah,” Gat replies casually. “From school.” Her tone is light and friendly and legitimately human-sounding. 

“Not from Redlands though, right?” Ryan asks, getting a pile of plates out of the cupboard for the buns and pastries.

“No,” Yaz puts in. “Secondary school.” The kettle dings, and she prepares two cups of tea for the newcomers. 

“Are you on the force as well?” Graham asks, and if the phrase stumps Gat she doesn’t show it. 

“No, I’m studying.”

“University of Sheffield?” he asks. 

“Yes.”

“What do you study?” Ryan asks, setting down the plates and opening the containers. Only some of the sweets are burnt. 

“Temporal mechanics.”

Yaz laughs a little too forcefully. “Don’t get him all excited. Graham’s a sci-fi nut, aren’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” he smiles knowingly at Yaz. “Spaceships and aliens, big fan.”

“Computer science,” Yaz says, setting down the two cups of tea, “that’s what she’s studying.” 

“Nice,” Ryan nods. “My mate Tibo’s doing IT.” 

“And how is Tibo?” Yaz cuts across before the conversation can swerve back to Gat. She takes her place at the table.

“Doing better now, yeah – floor’s open, by the way,” Ryan indicates the untouched containers. Obligingly, Yaz takes a fruit bun for herself and Gat. “Yeah, Yedlarmi and Ethan went round to see him with me, played some Fifa, you know. Culture shock for them, they’d never seen a game of –” Graham coughs loudly into his sleeve. “Of such high quality graphics,” Ryan finishes. “Yeah, proper good rendering these days.” 

“Still got a full house?” Yaz asks. 

“Oh yes,” Graham replies sagely. “Family visitors,” he says as an aside to Gat, who nods along, feigning ignorance. “But how have you been doing, Yaz?” 

Yaz nods, chewing through a mouthful of bun. It’s thick, like they didn’t put enough moisture in. She’s suffered through far worse with her Dad’s cooking. “Fine, yeah,” she says once she’s gulped it down. “Keeping busy. Went shopping with Mum the other day. And, you know,” she casts a look at Gat, “catching up with old mates. Things that remind me why this is my home, you know.”

“That’s the way,” Graham beams, giving Yaz’s shoulder an encouraging pat. “Yaz was off travelling,” Graham explains to Gat.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Gat replies casually. “I haven’t seen her in ages.” 

“Yeah, well,” Ryan says, “back now. Plans got cut short.” 

“So you were travelling with her?” Gat asks, feigning interest. She’s gotten halfway through her bun already, and her cup of black coffee has been drained. 

“Yeah, taking a break from, you know,” he gestures vaguely.

“Yeah,” Gat mutters, in a way that convincingly captures the dissatisfaction of a twenty-something caught in the day-to-day monotony of mundane life. “Definitely get that.” She takes a large bite of her bun. “And are you, you know…” she casually pulls a sheet of red-streaked hair back over her shoulder. “An item?”

“Oh, no, no,” Ryan says, chuckling nervously. “We’re just mates. Besides, it wasn’t just us. Graham was along too. Weird combo, I know, but he’s got the worldly experience and all that.”

Graham winks. “It’s because I was a bus driver,” he says through a mouthful of pastry. 

“Yeah, yeah, she doesn’t need to hear about that,” Ryan says, and Graham casts him a disparaging look. 

“Where did you go?” Gat asks. 

“All over, didn’t we Yaz, err,” Gat smiles in a predatory manner, enjoying watching him scrabble for answers. “You know, Peru, Madagascar, err, Norway. Australian outback. All over.”

“Sounds like it,” Gat nods, and if the boys notice the mocking edge to her tone, they don’t say anything. Yaz casts Gat a look with which she hopes to convey an exasperated _what are you playing at?_ Gat smiles.

When Yaz looks back to the others, she sees that Ryan and Graham are having a silent conversation of their own, exchanged through waggled eyebrows and jerks of the head. 

“Hey Yaz,” Ryan broaches, leaning forwards. “Could I, err, could I have a quick word?”

“Yeah, okay,” Yaz says slowly. It’s not as if he can ask her away on the pretence of washing up, given the proximity of the kitchen sink. Curse open-plan living. Graham gives Ryan an encouraging nod that he must think Yaz doesn’t notice. 

“Bedroom?” she asks Ryan when they’re both up from the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Graham flashing him a thumbs up, and suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. 

“Yeah, okay, as long as we’re not about to become an item.” 

She punches him on the arm, hard enough that it blurs the line between playful and antagonistic. “Shut up.” 

Ryan winces and grabs his upper arm, casting Yaz an appropriately sharp death-glare. “Try not to bore Gat to death Graham,” Ryan says pointedly. “No bus driver stories.”

“Hey, well, no promises.” He smiles warmly at Gat who, to Yaz’s shock, manages something in return that could only by the most eagle-eyed observer be recognised as a grimace. She looks over at Yaz as if to convey, once again through expression alone, that she definitely did _not_ sign up for this when she agreed to come round. Yaz flashes her an apologetic smile.

Ryan heads down the hall, and Yaz follows. When they were kids, it was usually her who would spend time at Ryans rather than the other way around, usually at his Nan’s rather than his parent’s place. Still, he’s spent enough time in Yaz’s flat to know his way around, and to watch her bedroom transform through all the phases of an obsessive kid’s early years. As they leave the main room, the thin walls betray the start of Graham and Gat’s conversation. 

“So, you don’t sound like you’re from around her, love. Another southerner?”

“Yeah, Gloucester. Moved here for Secondary school.”

“Ah, we visited Gloucester recently. Lovely place.”

“Haven’t been in your room since we were ten,” Ryan muses, looking up at the off-white plaster ceiling. “I remember this place being bigger.”

Yaz smiles. “I got rid of the Harry Potter posters.”

“No way,” he gasps sarcastically. In truth, her room doesn’t really feel like her own these days. There’s not much hanging up on the walls, and nothing new for the last couple of years. Birthday presents wilt in her cupboard unused, and the books on her bedside table sit unfinished since before her meeting with the Doctor. This flat was just a pitstop on the journey between two far more exciting destinations. The TARDIS always felt more like home, even when the Doctor dropped them home for weeks or months at a time, and it definitely had better bedrooms. 

“What did you want to ask?” Yaz asks Ryan as they step inside her bar-bones, not-her-own bedroom. She sits down on the bed with a huff. Her duvet is patterned with medallion creams and blues. TARDIS blue, but this time it’s a coincidence. 

“Are you doing okay?” he asks, with a sigh. He sits down beside her, looking up at the round paper light cover she’s had since she was fifteen. 

“Fine, like I said.”

“Yaz,” he says in that earnest way of his; wide-eyed and soul-bared. “I’m not fine, I’m really pretty far from fine, actually, so there’s no way you are.”

She scoffs. “Vote of confidence. Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Because I’m so dependent,” she mutters sulkily. 

“Well, yeah, sort of. Just,” he exhales deeply, steadying himself. “It’s okay to be sad.”

“I’m not sad I’m just…” she struggles to find the right word, and lands upon, “bored.” She isn’t sure it’s quite right. It sounds apathetic, which checks out, given her recent vindictive streak. 

“Yaz,” Ryan begins.

“I just miss her, and I miss travelling. I thought we’d be away for ages yet and I’m not ready, you know. I’m not ready to be back here. And I can’t stop thinking that…”

“What?” he prompts gently. 

“She’s got a time machine, Ryan.” Prickling behind her eyes, hot and wet and threatening. It’s like they’re challenging her. _Bet you’ll let me fall._ She wins the struggle. “If she made it out, then she would be here already. She would have come back for us, right?” 

His prolonged silence is answer enough, but eventually he finds the right words. What she likes about Ryan is that he isn’t the false-sweet sort of kind. He doesn’t sugar coat, or lie, or talk away your feelings like they’re nothing. He won’t tell you to hold your chin up high and smile, or that everything is going to be alright. He’s nothing like the Doctor, in that regard. 

“I don’t know.” It means _I don’t know if she made it out,_ but it also means _I don’t know if she would come back even if she could._ The second meaning sits between them like a bad smell, festering. It’s hard for the two of them to remember the way the Doctor used to be when they first met her, because her bumbling, evasive, awe-inspiring nature is tainted by too many cruel smiles, too many outbursts, and too many unsatisfactory insistences that everything was _fine._

It’s like an aftertaste, and it has overpowered everything that came before, so much so that Yaz is beginning to think the dish never tasted any good in the first place. “But her ship’s unreliable, right,” Ryan says. “Maybe she’ll be back soon.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“No.” That’s what she likes; no lies, even when it hurts. “Hey, if you still want me to take another look at that TARDIS, Ethan thinks it’s a waste of time but if you’ve got more notes I could –”

“It’s fine,” Yaz interrupts. “I know it’s pointless.” She doesn’t. If Gat had never shown up, she would still be trying. She thinks she would probably have kept on trying until she accidently blew up the ship, or the Doctor came back. “I’ll lock it up, try and get on with things.” She can’t quite bring herself to follow her own criteria. She isn’t about to tell him the truth. 

“That’s… good to hear. Sort of does my job for me, though. Me and Graham had it all planned out, how I was going to talk you down, convince you to leave the TARDIS alone for a bit, come stay with us for a while, if it’d help. Be around people you can talk to, you know, about what happened. We had rehearsals and everything.” 

“Well then, I hope Graham portrayed me a flattering light,” Yaz grins. 

Ryan snorts, his posture relaxing into an easy slump. Yaz remembers a short, skinny kid that tripped over his own feet in the cafeteria, and wonders when he came to be so wise. “But it’s good, seriously, to see you catching up with old mates. Adjusting.”

_Actually, Ryan, me and Gat will be swanning off back to Gallifrey soon, and I’m going to turn over every single burning stone until I find some sign of the Doctor._

Ryan breaks the silence. “So, Gat.”

Yaz raises her eyebrows. “Yep,” she clicks her tongue idly. “Gat.” 

“Are you and her...”

“No!” 

“Ok it’s just, I saw the way she was looking at you.”

“She wasn’t looking at me any sort of way!”

“Yeah, well, she only did it when you weren’t looking, didn’t she. That’s pining 101.” Yaz thinks he’s having a go at her, but he has the good sense not to mention the Doctor. 

“Look, I know she’s not interested,” Yaz explains, shifting to the defensive. “She can’t be she’s an –” _Alien,_ she doesn’t say. “She’s not interested in women,” she blurts out instead. 

“So was that her filthy plaid sitting in the bathroom?”

“Oi, that,” she holds her finger up accusingly, “is a stereotype.”

There’s a sound of movement from across the hall, and Sonya waltzes out of her bedroom humming to herself, only to stop in her tracks at the sight of Ryan. 

“Oh, hiya Ryan.” It’s like she’s flicked a switch; her permanent scowl replaced with a demure smile, her voice suddenly soft and sweet. Even her smudged makeup makes her look pretty, instead of like a deranged racoon. 

“Um,” Ryan puts his hand up to wave at her, but seems to think better of it and instead massages the back of his neck in an awkward gesture. “Hi Sonya.” 

“Have you met Yaz’s girlfriend?” She asks with a mischievous grin, stepping into Yaz’s bedroom. 

Ryan turns back to Yaz with a smug smile. “Err, yes I have.”

“She is _not_ –” Yaz begins. 

“So, wanna go for a drink some time?” Sonya asks bluntly, beaming at Ryan. 

Ryan seems to experience a range of emotions at once, and they flicker across his face in a flurry of discomfort, nervousness, elation. “Yeah,” his voice comes out croaky. “Yeah sounds – sounds good. Err, could I grab your number?” He stands up clumsily and fishes into his jeans pocket for his phone.

“Sure,” Sonya smiles.

“Ah, no – this,” Yaz points at the two of them, “is so not happening.” 

Sonya rolls her eyes. “Go chat to your girlfriend Yaz.”

“Yeah, better rescue her from Graham.” Yaz goes to retort, but thinks Ryan is probably right. When she barges past Sonya and Ryan, making sure to grunt disapprovingly as they exchange numbers, she is half expecting to find Gat wrestling Graham into a headlock, or at the least a very awkward silence. 

To her surprise, she hears laughter coming from the living room. When she ducks out of the hall, the laughter stops abruptly, and both Gat and Graham look at her with bemusement. 

“You two getting on then?” Yaz asks, eyeing Gat pointedly. 

“Just fine, Yaz,” Graham replies, reaching for a croissant. 

“Right,” Yaz narrows her eyes at Gat, wondering if she’s done some Time Lord trick on Graham to make him more agreeable. 

Ryan comes padding up the hall behind Yaz. “We on our way then Grandad?” he asks. She’s fairly sure she sees him sneak a covert thumbs-up gesture towards the table. “Don’t want to keep these two all day.” 

“Thanks for the food,” Gat says sweetly.

“Was this just your plan to palm off your leftovers?” Yaz asks him, stepping into the living room to let him pass. 

“Got me.” Ryan holds his hands up in surrender. 

“Well, thanks for stopping by,” she smiles, and leads them rather forcibly towards the door. “And let me know if you get sick of Raavio and all that, because the landlord still hasn’t managed to sell that flat a few floors up on account of the death on the premises, and, you know, all the cobwebs. Bet you could get it cheap.”

“Now that,” Graham points at Yaz with a smile, “that’s an idea, right lad?” he asks Ryan, who is already on his phone. Yaz is fairly sure that it is Sonya’s name typed out across the top of the screen. 

“Oh, yeah,” he murmurs absently, heading across the threshold. 

Before she can usher him out the door, Graham turns back to Yaz, smiling broadly. “Just wanted to let you know Yaz, I approve.”

“Approve of what?”

“Of your friend,” he winks very deliberately. “She seems very nice.” 

“Oh, we’re not –”

“It’s alright love,” he pats her fondly on the shoulder. “You two have fun now.” He cranes his neck and calls back into the apartment. “Lovely to meet you, Gat.”

“Goodbye,” Gat calls in reply. 

“Yep,” Yaz says shrewdly, practically shoving Graham out the door. “See ya.” Once the door is closed, Yaz leans back against it and sighs, letting herself sink a few inches toward the floor. 

“Empty house, right Yaz?” Gat says, getting up from the dining table with croissant in hand. 

“Yeah,” Yaz groans. “Empty.” 

“So, you really travelled the universe with those two?”

“Hey, they’re alright,” Yaz feels the need to defend them. 

“Very sweet,” Gat smiles sourly. “But I can see you’re the brains of the group, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, obviously.” Yaz tries not to smile. “You really held your own back there,” she says, walking towards her. “I thought you’d give yourself away for sure.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” Gat tilts her head to one side, smirking slightly. “You do realise I’m an elite agent trained in infiltration and espionage.”

“Right, yeah. It’s just,” Yaz feigns confusion, pacing in front of her. “You did hold a gun to my head when we first met and until yesterday you didn’t know what coffee was.” 

Gat’s smirk curls into a grin, sharp and sharkish. Without the stench of mothballs and engine grit, with the dark shadows scrubbed from beneath her eyes, and her matted hair brushed to a long, black sheet hanging gracefully over her shoulders – with her jeans and her baggy T-shirt – she looks normal. More than that, she looks beautiful. Yaz finds herself standing a little too close for a little too long, and wonders if what Ryan said to her has any merit. She also wonders if Gat can still read her mind. 

“Want to take those back with us?” Yaz barges past Gat hurriedly, hiding her blush. There’s another container of unopened baked goods still sitting on the dining table. 

“We could,” Gat says, noncommittal. “Do you have any more biscuits?”

Still looking away from her, Yaz smiles.

**Gat**

By midday, they’re back in the TARDIS. Yaz packed Gat some more clothes; underwear, an extra pair of jeans, a few garishly-coloured T-shirts. It’s patronising but, admittedly, helpful. She had fun toying with Yaz’s friends, and found their immediate assumptions that they were, as Yaz put it, an ‘item’, as hilarious as it was insulting. 

Hilariously insulting, that’s all. That’s why her chest feels light and her smile comes easier than it has in years. 

Yaz has been talking her ear off all the way back to the TARDIS, during which Gat found the sunlight pleasant, deepening to a warm yellow as the grey cloud cover slunk away. Generally, anyone talking to Gat for that long is liable to have something detached from them, but Gat finds Yaz’s stories engaging. Gat has made a great many daring escapes in her tenure, but Yaz has gotten into close scrapes rivalling even a Division agent’s accomplishments, and weaselled out of them with a similar concoction of wit and dexterity and sheer luck. 

As Gat tucks the clothes into her duffel bag of re-stolen weaponry, and as Yaz finishes telling her about that-one-time the Slitheen had her pushed up against the edge of a cliff overlooking an active acid slime volcano, a question comes to mind. 

“Why are you helping me?” From her position crouched on the ground, she looks up at Yaz. Now is definitely not the time to be thinking about how pretty she looks with the white glow of the TARDIS shining through her dark hair. 

“Err, because I want a lift back to Gallifrey and I wasn’t getting anywhere by myself,” she says, smiling. Gat is fairly sure she’s been smiling since they left her apartment. 

“No,” Gat corrects her, standing up. You bought coffee and helped out and got on my good side, but you didn’t stop there.”

“Oh, am I on your good side? News to me,” Yaz chuckles. Her eyes keep darting away, focusing on anything that isn’t Gat. 

“Well, you’re not dead,” Gat says, and she remains steadfast in her eye contact long enough that Yaz has no choice but to reciprocate. “You’re being nice to me, why?”

Yaz furrows her brows, as if confused. As if the answer is obvious. It isn’t to Gat, whatever it may be. This isn’t the way that people behave, life, by nature, is built on reciprocity. You don’t give things without expecting something in return, that’s why you don’t accept help unless you know who you’re dealing with, and what they want. That’s why you don’t trust an ex-renegade Time Lord when they, calling upon a life-debt owed, ask you to help them break into somewhere that no one has any right to be. “Because you’re in trouble,” Yaz says, stepping forward. Gat can see the passion behind her words; the conviction, the righteousness. Gat recognises it because she’s felt it, pride drawing her shoulders back, and her chin up, but not in kindness. On Gallifrey, pride in anything but the Time Lords gets you nowhere. If fact, more often than not, it gets you killed. “You’re scared and you’re alone and I…” Yaz exhales, looking at Gat levelly. “I know what that feels like.”

“Right,” she nods. “Okay.”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

Because certain things are coming to light, because her little exercise at blending in was a convenient distraction from the images still threaded through her subconscious – of a war blossoming across the cosmos – but it’s more than that, worse than that. Without the Matrix – with herself now integrated into a paradigm in which it doesn’t exist, sequestered outside of the universe – without its mind to connect to her own, and bolster the adjustments it made to her natural state, she is left behind, unravelling. Hidden memories leaking through the gaps in the frayed web. 

Because she can barely believe in herself, at the moment, in her life, her people, her pride. How can she believe in anyone else? 

Yaz senses her distress, and takes another step forwards – senses it because, again, Gat can’t control herself, and it escapes her in droves, in synaptic wavefronts radiating out into the pale console-glow. The support structure is all gone. Her _mind_ is gone, locked away in another universe. 

“What’s happening?” Yaz asks, and her earnesty stings. “Gat, what’s wrong?”

“I need to get home.” Or she needs to get away from home – as far away as she can, and she needs to never stop running because she’s beginning to get a sense of just how much she was forced to forget, for the sake of efficiency. 

“We’re almost there, like you said. Expanding the search parameters.” 

“Yes,” Gat walks over to the console to survey the monitor. “Almost.” She checks the lists of temporal coordinates generated in her absence. It seems that the reason they appeared scrambled was – though first and foremost due to Gallifrey being outside of conceivable space-time – because the planet is oscillating between positions, different pockets of self-sustained space generated and snuffed out. The planet is hurtling through nothingness in a cloud of temporal energy. A good way to hide, she reasons, when the entire universe seeks revenge. 

From the ship’s simulations, it seems to change positions every twenty hours or so, jumping between a finite set of hundreds of different locations. It’s possible that they could activate the ship’s return protocol and reach Gallifrey through the eddies of time energy that appear like scars across the universe in seemingly random positions. There, a desolate planet; there, the middle of the void; there, the core of a molten world. 

In short, they’re ready. She could start the shields running again and program their departure in just a few hours. 

But there’s a Shobogan village deep in the featureless crimson steppe and they’ve been replicating counterfeit technology, stealing from Gallifrey’s great cities. Bandits and savages seeking to steal the secrets of regeneration for themselves. In the centre of the square, there are Time Lord corpses tied to spikes and radiating feeble gold. The village is burned to the ground by morning, and there are no survivors. It happened before the Division, when she was just a hopeful military recruit rising through the ranks, so how far back does the mould spread? Their _hands_ –

“How’re we looking?” Yaz asks, studying the screen of foreign text without recognition. 

“I don’t know yet,” Gat lies. It’s worse, back in the TARDIS. Out there on the dull planetside with its weak sunlight and passing, chattering minds, she is distracted. She can clear her mind with the noise of it all, the wash of linearity like citrus; burning, detoxifying. In here, the voices of her people are close, the grief of the ship is _close_ , and she can feel its mind beneath her, growing impatient, eager to leave. 

There’s a man that she watched die who was her dearest friend. She watched him turned inside out and his timeline torn to pieces by volatile technology brutally assembled from cannibalised TARDIS remains and she can’t get the image out of her head, she can’t sleep anymore, can barely concentrate and, by the next mission briefing, it is gone. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Yaz asks.

“I didn’t say I was.” It comes out more as a grunt than a candid retort. 

Because there’s a planet burning in a slow solar blast but their radio equipment is still on, still broadcasting, and their primitive screams are drowned out by licks of flame. The Ranjins cannot rise. In a highly-potential projected timeline, their power will rival that of the Time Lords, and their rule will bring havoc and war. They must never be permitted to begin. 

She isn’t sure when Yaz’s hand closes over her own where it digs, nock-knuckled and tight upon the console’s edge. Her touch is warm, and grounding. She breathes deeply. 

A dam of old sensation, threatening to break. She remembers the photographs on Yaz’s cabinet, the big, black eyes of all those children. When she recalls that time in her own life, there is no sensation. There are no good days, and there are no bad days. What she finds is fact, facts that might have happened to anyone; impersonal, unspecific. Necessary, of course, because agents of the timeline can have no place within it, knowledge begets paradox, and chaos, and cataclysm. All the same, it hurts to dwell upon. Details push through the texture, drip slow and viscous through tightly-knitted gauze. Arcadia, at some point in its everlasting history (and she tries not to remember the image of it burning). A family left behind when she was almost too young to remember, to serve the elite, to someday rise amongst them by virtue of the talents she possessed. 

In amongst the facts, now tainted with unearthed memory, a detail glints like a salty tear. She feels it in her eye. 

She thinks she might have had a sister. 

Yaz is still holding her hand. She has no reason to; it’s pointless and dangerous and irrational to feel even a touch of her pain. Gat has nothing to offer her but a return trip to a fiery wasteland. It makes no sense – this whole _planet_ makes no sense, with its coffee and its sunny Saturday mornings, its concerned friends and bumbling Grandfathers and too-tough pastries, they are _small._

No, small isn’t the right word at all, because somehow Yaz’s touch is weight enough to keep her grounded, to give her hope. 

Gat turns to face Yaz, lifting her weight from the console. “Thank you,” she says. 

“That’s okay,” Yaz smiles. She reaches up and puts a hand on Gat’s shoulder. “Can you tell me what’s going on, because I’m lost. Is it the Matrix stuff, like the visions? The war? Or probably the fact that your entire planet’s –”

“Why do you talk so much?” Gat smiles, fond and sad. 

“I only talk this much when I’m nervous.” 

She's been talking since they left her flat. Gat smirks. “Why are you nervous?” 

“Because you could probably snap my neck with your mind powers, or something.”

Already, Gat feels the hurt softened, its edge blunted. The past can’t hurt her when the present looks like this, when the present is so close. “Probably,” she shrugs.

“Look just,” Yaz drops her hand from Gat’s shoulder. “Just tell me if you need anything, okay? Because you’re going through a lot, so much I can’t even imagine it. And I want to help you, yeah? Not for any other reason than that.” She gives Gat a small smile, lips pressed together quick and curt and shy, eyes down. “You just have to let me.” 

Gat isn’t precisely sure where the instinct comes from – perhaps from her turmoil, or from her desperation to feel anything other than the old pain that burrows frozen daggers into the back of her mind – but these are excuses. These are lies to excuse the pointless, and the risky, and the wrong. The truth is that Yaz is looking at her with an openness that Gat has never seen on another’s face. In ardent kindness and willing vulnerability, she stands, because beside the quick wit and ferocity that drove her to wrestle the gun from the hands of a dangerous alien, and keep on fighting, there is an equally ferocious kindness. Kindness without compromise, without relent. It’s like a weapon, in her hands.

It's the threat of its impact that spurs her on, and suffocates rational thought.

Gat surges forwards and takes Yaz’s face in her hands, pressing their lips together. In a moment of frozen shock, Yaz stands still, and Gat can feel her heart beating through her nerves in her cheeks, feel her brain reeling in surprise that softens, settles, and flowers into delight. Yaz wraps her hands around Gat’s waist, and kisses her back. 

There is more than sensation passed between them, exchanged in sparks behind closed eyes, open mouths. Two different forms of grief, passed, shared, evaporated. It is quick, desperate in the way they reach, and push. Gat’s hands move back to loop around Yaz’s neck, fingers tangled in dark hair. 

When they pull apart, no more than a few moments have passed, but to both it feels longer. Minds untangle, they are singular again.

“Wow,” breathes Yaz. “Okay.” 

“No need to go on about it,” Gat says.

Yaz smiles, wide and unrestrained. “Oh, you think?”

Gat’s composure breaks, and she smiles back. Yaz looks away for a moment, hesitates, steps away, and steals a hurried glance back. Another smile, another shy glance at her feet. Gat watches her, taking in the smallest of movements. Yaz mutters something about forgetting to lock the car, and rushes for the doors. Gat watches her go, and smiles at the slight skip in her step. Childish, she thinks, though her expression remains – infuriatingly – fond. 

This _Othering_ planet. 

From beyond the door, amongst the neat flowerbeds and the noonday sun, she hears Yaz laugh. 

Gat turns back to the monitor and surveys the coordinates. Just a few calculations, a few adjustments. Presently, the tumultuous entrance to Galifrey’s reality pocket rests on the cusp of the Horsehead Nebula. It isn’t far from here. 

Her home beckons, but despite all her time spent looking, she hesitates. It isn’t only the memory of flames and blackened towers that dissuades her, because she is ready to face the ruins, to commandeer another vehicle, to reestablish a local Matrix connection, and to return to her own time. What stays her hand is their final instruction; _failure isn’t an option._

They will take her job, and her memories of it, and she isn’t sure who she will be without that. The rest of her has been so thoroughly scrubbed clean in the name of efficiency, in the polishing of a blank slate, and the forging of a sharpened blade to rest in the palm of the empire. And there is war on the horizon, a war that will begin, in part, due to the work she has perpetuated through her pride. 

Perhaps in a few more hours, she reasons, when she’s had more time to examine the memories that are beginning to trail their way back to her, clawing over the cusp of the abyss. Perhaps in a few more hours, that she can spend with Yaz. 

Soon, she tells herself, with her hand poised above the TARDIS controls. From beneath, the ship screams at her to _hurry._

Soon, she tells it, and feels its frustration like a blow. She turns off the monitor and backs away from the console, going to follow Yaz outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is like a Sonata, or a fluff sandwich between angsty, angsty bread slices.  
> I started writing this chapter before the special, and then the Doctor straight up Murdered the house TARDIS so... err. Thanks.  
> In this chapter I am fully drawing upon my limited 2 year living experience in the UK when I was 7-9, which is where we get the 7 Up and Hobnobs and Chessington World of Adventures. They don't have 7 Up where I'm from so I permanently associate it with England.  
> It seems like the show forgot about the cyberguys, so in my hc Ethan and Raavio live in the spider apartment, and Tibo and Yedlarmi are dating now and yes, I do make the rules.  
> Also I went all in on the 6B theory ;-;   
> Please let me know what you think :)

**Author's Note:**

> here's a little fanart
> 
> [](https://ibb.co/cJXZ0WB)  
> 


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